Michaël Borremans is a figurative painter. That may seem like a simple statement, but given the state of contemporary art—with its endless carnival of art fairs peddling vacuous abstraction, celebrity-hyped artists, and conceptualism-light—the fact that Borremans paints the kinds of pictures he does is actually a radical proposition.
The Belgian artist, who will receive his first large-scale U.S. museum survey this month at the Dallas Museum of Art, paints portraits and still-lifes, those archaic artistic genres that critics and academics still can’t seem to fully pronounce as dead. Borremans’ work is recognizable for its ambiguous subject matter and particular palate and tonality. The subjects bask in a cool Nordic light, all ash gray and washed-out flatness. Each of his paintings presents a scene as suggestive as it is elusive, like open-ended parables. Take The Load (III), 2009, for example, one of Borremans’ simpler paintings. The artist depicts a young girl lying on her back, her head wrapped in a white cap, her face obscured by the peculiar perspective. What is striking about the image is how little it gives you. Its weary palette, lack of detail, and obscured subject seem hardly there. And yet, the portrait somehow possesses a quiet dynamism.
The immediate antecedent of this kind of contemporary realism is the German painter Gerhard Richter. But Borremans’ style, its inherent drama, the way his subjects clog up the frame, the way they somehow seem to exist in a space between the surface of the canvas and the trompe l’oeil illusion, owes more to painters of prior generations, like Manet, Velázquez, or Caravaggio.
In each of his paintings, it feels like Borremans is playing a game of cat and mouse. We’re drawn into an apparent narrative before realizing that it can’t take us anywhere. He has a deft touch for capturing reality accurately while rendering it slightly ajar. There is something both seductive and alienating about these paintings. And here’s where Borremans manages to firmly situate himself in the present moment. These paintings revel in their fragmented sense of place, in a broken sense of narrative. At a time when the world is increasingly abstract, Borremans submits his paintings as evidence that this particular form of painterly expression retains its validity. Perhaps now more than ever, this kind of painting is uniquely equipped to lead us to encounter something real.
This column first appeared in the March edition of D Magazine.
