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拍品专文
‘I find what I like so much about painting, from since I was a little boy, is that they’re so mysterious. They are like a door or window to a place you cannot enter, but you can see. And I still use this aspect strongly in all my work.’
—MICHAEL BORREMANS
‘The archetypal Borremans painting is a seductive enigma, a bouillabaisse of specificity, obscurity, anxiety, humour and great technique.’
—MARTIN HERBERT
In The Egg (2009), Michaël Borremans’ delivers a mystifying, dreamlike scene with haunting clarity and stillness: a young woman in red sits in a sepia-toned room, gazing at an egg resting in her right hand. The artist conjures the sense of an uncanny, timeless alternative reality; Borremans’ responsive brushwork animates the woman with a fleshy reality, her gently curving fingers taking on an iconic power as the egg balances in her hand. However what this iconography might ultimately signify remains ominously obscure. The woman’s pose recalls other Borremans’ works in which women look down at their outstretched hands, as if holding something invisible or an object that has only just disappeared into thin air, leaving what Hans Rudolf Rest Reust describes as ‘the feeling that there is something latent in the picture, the notion that an event, difficult to grasp, has either occurred or is about to occur, even though it is not actually depicted’ (H. R. Ruest, Michael Borremans: As sweet as it gets, exh. cat., Dallas Museum of Art/BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels, 2014, p. 182). In The Egg however, this vacant space is filled by the image of the egg, expertly realised in rich flesh tones that seem to dissolve into the woman’s hand – only heightening the sense of an ambiguous absence, the meaning of the egg remains elusive.
Executed in Borremans’ virtuosic style, a product of the artist’s sustained, rigorous study of the Old Masters’ work and techniques, his acutely sensitive handling of paint gives the work a classical elegance; reading initially as portraiture or an intimate scene from life, the painting’s solemn, isolated mood recalls Degas’ forlorn portraits or the delicate visions of the everyday found in Murillo or Velázquez. Yet with its anonymous woman immersed in the egg, and its eerily neutral tones, the painting seems to resist these categorisations, creating a stranger space for itself beyond those traditions. Instead, the work seems not to be painted directly from life, but in a kind of nowhere place in which life floats as in a dream, or the blank stage of an absurdist play – and in fact Borremans paints from photographs he has taken himself in his studio, carefully stage-managing his models and props into his mysterious mises-en-scène. This theatrical nowhereness survives in the painting, but rather than turning to photorealism, Borremans’ work uses paint to further subvert and twist the reality represented by photographic images. Borremans, for example, uploads his photographs on to a computer monitor which he places at a distance from his canvas, introducing ambiguity out of necessity: ‘When you place it further [away] you have to find painterly solutions for what you see… you have to guess… If you’re too close to a photograph technically then you make a dull painting – it’s more exciting when you make it risky. That’s what you see in work by Velázquez or Manet: that’s why I’ve learnt so much from them’ (M. Borremans, quoted in M. Gray, ‘The modern mysteries of Michaël Borremans,’ Apollo Magazine, March 2016). Borremans’ genius is in exploiting the way in which painting removes its subject matter, unreal and detached, yet fantastically alive. In The Egg this exquisitely painterly treatment of the woman and her egg exaggerates their dreamlike distance from reality, whilst bringing them to life.
—MICHAEL BORREMANS
‘The archetypal Borremans painting is a seductive enigma, a bouillabaisse of specificity, obscurity, anxiety, humour and great technique.’
—MARTIN HERBERT
In The Egg (2009), Michaël Borremans’ delivers a mystifying, dreamlike scene with haunting clarity and stillness: a young woman in red sits in a sepia-toned room, gazing at an egg resting in her right hand. The artist conjures the sense of an uncanny, timeless alternative reality; Borremans’ responsive brushwork animates the woman with a fleshy reality, her gently curving fingers taking on an iconic power as the egg balances in her hand. However what this iconography might ultimately signify remains ominously obscure. The woman’s pose recalls other Borremans’ works in which women look down at their outstretched hands, as if holding something invisible or an object that has only just disappeared into thin air, leaving what Hans Rudolf Rest Reust describes as ‘the feeling that there is something latent in the picture, the notion that an event, difficult to grasp, has either occurred or is about to occur, even though it is not actually depicted’ (H. R. Ruest, Michael Borremans: As sweet as it gets, exh. cat., Dallas Museum of Art/BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels, 2014, p. 182). In The Egg however, this vacant space is filled by the image of the egg, expertly realised in rich flesh tones that seem to dissolve into the woman’s hand – only heightening the sense of an ambiguous absence, the meaning of the egg remains elusive.
Executed in Borremans’ virtuosic style, a product of the artist’s sustained, rigorous study of the Old Masters’ work and techniques, his acutely sensitive handling of paint gives the work a classical elegance; reading initially as portraiture or an intimate scene from life, the painting’s solemn, isolated mood recalls Degas’ forlorn portraits or the delicate visions of the everyday found in Murillo or Velázquez. Yet with its anonymous woman immersed in the egg, and its eerily neutral tones, the painting seems to resist these categorisations, creating a stranger space for itself beyond those traditions. Instead, the work seems not to be painted directly from life, but in a kind of nowhere place in which life floats as in a dream, or the blank stage of an absurdist play – and in fact Borremans paints from photographs he has taken himself in his studio, carefully stage-managing his models and props into his mysterious mises-en-scène. This theatrical nowhereness survives in the painting, but rather than turning to photorealism, Borremans’ work uses paint to further subvert and twist the reality represented by photographic images. Borremans, for example, uploads his photographs on to a computer monitor which he places at a distance from his canvas, introducing ambiguity out of necessity: ‘When you place it further [away] you have to find painterly solutions for what you see… you have to guess… If you’re too close to a photograph technically then you make a dull painting – it’s more exciting when you make it risky. That’s what you see in work by Velázquez or Manet: that’s why I’ve learnt so much from them’ (M. Borremans, quoted in M. Gray, ‘The modern mysteries of Michaël Borremans,’ Apollo Magazine, March 2016). Borremans’ genius is in exploiting the way in which painting removes its subject matter, unreal and detached, yet fantastically alive. In The Egg this exquisitely painterly treatment of the woman and her egg exaggerates their dreamlike distance from reality, whilst bringing them to life.