Michaël Borremans: Fire from the Sun (Spotlight)

Product Information

These ghostly figments remind us of the artist’s hand (another detached extremity) and its control over what we see and what we don’t.

The painted figure is beside the point, more absent than present, an object to be posed and deciphered like a riddle, rather than a subject with a story. In some of the paintings the children are in the process of disappearing: phantom bodies not quite removed from their gruesome acts.The first in a series of small-format publications devoted to single bodies of work, Fire from the Sun highlights Michaël Borremans’s new work, which features toddlers engaged in playful but mysterious acts with sinister overtones and insinuations of violence. Other paintings in the exhibition depict obscure machines, whose enigmatic presence appears foreboding in the context of the toddlers and suggests an element of scientific experimentation. Available in both English-only and bilingual English/traditional Chinese editions, this series makes the work of these important artists accessible to a wider audience. As unsettling punctuation marks Borremans also included two large paintings of industrial apparatuses.

Each title in the Spotlight Series from David Zwirner Books features new work by a leading contemporary artist. Fire from the Sun includes small and large scale works that feature toddlers engaged in playful but mysterious acts with sinister overtones and insinuations of violence. The general opening was likewise packed—crammed, stuffed—no doubt with people from different starting points. This is a set or a stage, devoid of context, withholding of answers, but suggestive of a director or someone watching.The drama of the paintings is heightened by their visual connection to each other—and, more broadly, to older works by Borremans.

The children are presented alone or in groups against a studio-like backdrop that negates time and space, while underlining the theatrical atmosphere and artifice that exists throughout Borremans’s recent work. Hong Kong is an international city, a port city, a crux of world politics, world history and world finances.

Having travelled from Los Angeles to attend the opening, I juxtaposed these paintings against the morning’s news: against cavalier acts of violence and bloody origins, against history’s unwillingness to be erased, no matter the pressure to do so.

Previous solo exhibitions at the gallery include Black Mould (London, 2015) The Devil’s Dress (New York, 2011), Taking Turns (New York, 2009), Horse Hunting (New York, 2006), and Trickland (New York, 2003). Borremans uses the language of portraiture to draw in the viewer but then subverts our expectations and understanding of the works. But even if the paintings deceptively represent a vacuum (lack of context, setting, explanation), they are not made in one. Reminiscent of cherubs in Renaissance paintings, the toddlers appear as allegories of the human condition, their archetypal innocence contrasted with their suggested deviousness. Work by the artist is held in public collections internationally, including Art Institute of Chicago; Dallas Museum of Art; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.In some fictional future, they might be unreliable carriers of this formative origin story or trauma. The paintings live in the seductive space of metaphor and possibility, which can stretch beyond the artist’s intentions. He has since written extensively on modern and contemporary art and culture, and is a contributor to Burlington and frieze magazines. As Michael Bracewell argues in new scholarship on the artist, published in the accompanying exhibition catalogue, viewers are “caught in a strange time loop, in which the nobility of execution ascribed to Old Masters―the re-creation in painting of human presence, caught both stilled, in a particular instant of its being, and for eternity―is placed in the service of vertiginous modernist vision.