Soldier

Luc Tuymans’s quiet, elegiac paintings, copied from old photographs or newspaper illustrations, draw upon the act of remembrance and the function of collective memory. Describing his process, Tuymans explained, "I usually finish [a painting] in a single day, partly in order not to lose my concentration and partly in order to have the chance not to come too close to the image I am using as my model." Often his canvases refer to his experience growing up in Belgium, a country ravaged by war and haunted by its history of colonial oppression in Africa and Asia. Based on a photograph of a World War I soldier, this work is a haunting, strangely ambiguous partial portrait that suggests that the history of war is more forgotten than remembered.