Michaël Borremans: Fire from the Sun (Spotlight)

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They are untethered, directionless, forever waiting in a non-place, forever forced to repeat pointless actions that seem to have no beginning or no end.

Published on the occasion of Borremans’s eponymous exhibition at David Zwirner in Hong Kong, this publication is available in both English-only and bilingual English/traditional Chinese editions. 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.He was co-curator of The Secret Public: The Last Days of the British Underground 1978–1988 at Kunstverein Muenchen and The Institute of Contemporary Arts, London in 2006 and The Dark Monarch: British Modernism and the Occult at Tate St Ives in 2009. From the outset the artist understood he was taking a risk with the new works, precisely because of their open relationship with interpretation. Fire from the Sun sits cozily—bloodily, cleverly—on the art history couch next to Goya and Francis Bacon, but the exhibition is not an exercise in appropriation or a closed circuit of art talking to art. While the fire and (probable) cannibalism imply some sort of ritual, the works are most chilling as sketches of random violence, causal and instinctual.

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. These images are not outliers: they are set against that same backdrop and clearly part of the fragments that we are meant to piece together. 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.To finish on a lighter note, David Zwirner’s first outpost in Asia will located in H Queen’s, the new tower in Hong Kong’s Central district. This is a set or a stage, devoid of context, withholding of answers, but suggestive of a director or someone watching.