Luc Tuymans, The Heritage VI (1996). Oil on canvas, 20 7/8 x 17 1/8 in. (53 x 43.5 cm.) David Zwirner Gallery, New York.

This certainly isn’t a straightforward portrait; Tuymans seems to want to draw our attention to the way in which the image of this man’s face is mediated.

A lot of Luc’s images come from things that already exist, like photographs in books and magazines. He has also taken a lot of photographs of television screens. He often takes a Polaroid photograph of a photograph in a magazine, so that there’s an extra level of distance or mediation. He loves the murky, liquidy, acid quality of Polaroids. Recently he’s been getting a lot of his imagery from the Web. There’s a kind of fluidity to images on the Web that he likes. The figure in Heritage VI is one of the people supposedly involved in the Kennedy-Oswald assassinations, and that points to one of Luc’s interests: the profoundly conspiratorial nature of power. Power, which is never something that represents itself fully or honestly, but rather is always veiled, sublimated, and cynical in its presentation of itself. Even if you don’t know that this figure has the shadowy connotation of being involved in an assassination attempt — and no matter where you fall on the “did Oswald act alone?” question, which is, of course, one of the great conspiracy stories of our culture — there is something iconically American about this image. The openness of the face, the broadness of the smile, the directness of the visual engagement, the whiteness of the skin and hair, and the classic late-’40s, early-’50s eyeglasses he wears make him into a kind of American everyman. And the way the image is cropped makes it akin to a passport photo, photo booth photo, or mugshot; it plays along that register of bureaucratic to pleasurable to pathological.

© Luc Tuymans. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York