Michaël Borremans

Michael Borremans was born in 1963 in Geraardsbergen, Belgium, and currently lives and works in Ghent, Belgium. He is an artist who engages with different media: painting, video, and installations. In the creative act of his works, a form of cyclicality emerges, starting from the photographic image that underpins the watercolors, which then evolve into paintings and are subsequently developed into videos and, eventually, photographed again. Michael Borremans, aware of the fact that, as Giorgio De Chirico said, "without the discovery of the past, the discovery of the present is impossible," is unafraid to acknowledge his debts to artists such as Francis Bacon, Goya, Velasquez, Manet, filmmaker David Lynch, and video artist Bill Viola. References to great names in past art, as well as to more contemporary figures, do not lead to the absence of a personal artistic identity; indeed, Borremans' creativity stands out as realistic figurative art, the result of a personal intuition rather than a deep reflection on another's idea. The Belgian artist feels inspired and captivated by what he himself describes as "the magic of the image." In creating his works, he tends to focus on a specific cultural reality, where the focal point is to capture the essence of human presence. Borremans achieves the creation of metaphysical and surreal worlds, a personal imaginary inhabited by figures that are timeless and devoid of history, a production that refers to an anti-narrative. On the canvases appear unidentifiable individuals or fragments of the body. The fragmented representation of the human being in its physicality, as in the case of the work The Veils from 2001, renders the protagonists of his works veiled and indecipherable subjects, inhabitants of a dimension defined by silence. Borremans enhances the psyche of the characters by creating a mystical and alienating atmosphere, thanks in large part to a great mastery of painting technique, which allows him to both respect and simultaneously consolidate the hieratic nature of the image. The individuals present in his works do not suggest any form of communication; they often have their heads bowed, and sometimes their pupils are omitted from the drawing. Characters appear as if frozen in a precise moment, closed within themselves and in an action that does not unfold; decontextualized figures that seem to come from a time close to our own but not quite of this world. His paintings draw us in: they seem familiar, yet we never fully grasp their ultimate meaning, leaving us suspended. His primary quality lies in the ability to transform the mundane aspects of daily life into something mysterious and enigmatic, elevating them to a higher level of reality. The apex of enigma and absurdity is reached in the works where Borremans "frames" only a detail of the body, as in the case of the diptych The Resemblance, where the hand and its gestures become an extension of the artist's creative and spiritual thought. Represented alongside the tools of his trade, they denote the role of the creator of the artwork and aid in visualizing the most particular of portraits—the portrait of the self—rich in social and psychological implications. To show the hand means, for the artist, to show himself. In one of the two canvases, the hands belong to a craftsman artist, unrefined, suggesting that the craft is made with the hands. The sheets, essentially identical, allegorically narrate the theme of painting understood as imitation, merely an action of the hand on the canvas, without engaging the spiritual and conceptual part of the artist. The absence of a watch does not imply that time is nonexistent but simply that the passage of time is not important. In the second canvas, the artist grasps a sheet on which it seems that bold brushstrokes erase what lies beneath. With the other hand, he points to the canvas itself, as if to say that the artist, while using the classical method of painting, does not merely wish to copy, as was done in the past, but wants to transfer onto the canvas what he feels, sees, and observes. The deformed watch on the wrist of the "craftsman" artist invites the viewer to reconsider the dimensions of time and memory in which before and after mutually contaminate each other. What interests the artist today, hence the self-portrait, is not so much being recognized for perfection in the depiction of an image, but for the preparatory moment. For him, that is the decisive moment, the one that precedes the painting. It is as if the work begins a moment before, at the time when the act of painting has not yet started, but the conceptual elaboration is completely clarified. When Borremans decides to paint, he has already determined what to paint.