M HKA Ensembles

Print, 60 x 80 x 5 cm.

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. BK7409_M267).

Three-dimensional digital print behind sandblasted perspex.

Published by documenta 11_Editions, Kassel.
Produced by Jörg Schellmann Art, München.
Signed and numbered.

With a cinematic sensibility, Luc Tuymans paints tense and charged social, cultural, and political subjects, implied and alluded to rather than explicitly addressed, concealed beneath the aesthetically pleasing, almost “twee,” palette and hazy blur. This 3D-collaged digital print depicts a wedding chapel in a Mormon temple, an image only privy to the eyes of church members, and produced by Tuymans after a photograph of the space from a surveillance camera. Challenging the perceptual process with his sublime works, Tuymans responds to the ethically fraught associations with marriage in religious sects by undermining the covert and exclusive treatment of this area and exposes the omnipresence of surveillance all the while maintaining mystery with the dream-like quality of his seemingly somnambulant scenes. Discreet yet unsettling, this print highlights the gaping magnitude of impotence and passive spectatorship only once the cognitive references are clear, paradoxically encouraging a passive escapism on a purely visual level.