The Art of the Ephemeral [VIDEO]

Michael Kurcfeld interviews Luc Tuymans at the Louvre’s Valentin de Boulogne rotunda, where the artist’s murals were recently on display.

By Michael KurcfeldSeptember 13, 2025

• Art & Architecture

Text by LARB Staff. Video by Michael Kurcfeld.

¤

SINCE THE 1980s, the Belgian artist Luc Tuymans has forged an approach to painting defined as much by what it withholds as what it shows. His canvases are very often pale, muted, and drained of color, their subjects blurred or cropped until they hover between recognition and disappearance. They are at once simple and charged. Tuymans paints quickly, usually finishing a work in a single day, but the speed belies the years of historical research and image-gathering behind each canvas. The resultant body of work pulls viewers into a realm defined by memory, trauma, and representation, frequently haunted by the aftershocks of 20th-century events, including the Holocaust, colonialism, and political violence. Yet Tuymans approaches these subjects obliquely, through secondhand images, old film stills, banal interiors, or seemingly minor details, asking how history lingers in the margins, and what kind of responsibility an artist bears in depicting—or refusing to depict—violence.

Over the past three decades, this vision has made Tuymans one of the most acclaimed living painters. He represented Belgium at the Venice Biennale in 2001, and he has mounted major solo presentations at such institutions as Tate Modern in London, Haus der Kunst in Munich, the Menil Collection in Houston, and UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. His works are in the collections of museums ranging from the Centre Pompidou to MoMA.

In May 2024, Tuymans was invited to paint a temporary suite of murals in the Valentin de Boulogne rotunda at the Louvre. The four-panel work, L’Orphelin (The Orphan), spoke directly to the paintings of the French and Dutch schools in the neighboring galleries and to features throughout the museum. Evoking the Louvre’s history as a place of study and training for artists, three of the panels depict, in a highly abstracted manner, the cleaning of a palette. At the same time, these panels evoke Tuymans’s long-standing interest in occlusion, disappearance, erasure, and the passage of time—as does the fourth panel, a reimagining of one of his paintings that has been lost for many years. Such themes are echoed in the mural’s ultimate fate: they were, as had always been planned, painted over in May 2025, one year after their creation.