Michaël Borremans: Fire from the Sun (Spotlight)

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In some of the paintings the children are in the process of disappearing: phantom bodies not quite removed from their gruesome acts. The children do not appear to be distressed or disturbed (though some viewers at the gallery may be).

It is difficult to concentrate on the weight of the artist’s brushstrokes when such a scene is staring you in the face. This is a set or a stage, devoid of context, withholding of answers, but suggestive of a director or someone watching. Michaël Borremans: Fire from the Sun [author]Katya Tylevich[/author] visits a brutal and profound exhibition by the Belgian artist Michaël Borremans, featuring a host of Sistine-style cherubs, sometimes covered in blood. There is an atmosphere of brewing tension and anxiety with an undertow of horror tugging away beneath the surface in his paintings: with his paintbrush Borremans brings to life a cargo of existentialism. The previous year, Michaël Borremans: The Advantage, the artist’s first museum solo show in Japan, was on view at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo.

The art of Michaël Borremans seems always to have been predicated on a confluence of enigma, ambiguity, and painterly poetics―accosting beauty with strangeness; making historic Romanticism subjugate to mysterious controlling forces that are neither crudely malevolent nor necessarily benign. Hong Kong is an international city, a port city, a crux of world politics, world history and world finances. Like Red Hand, Green Hand, this exhibition has an intuitive relevance to the time in which it was created and the circumstances in which it first exhibited. 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.

But even if the paintings deceptively represent a vacuum (lack of context, setting, explanation), they are not made in one. I heard other interpretations while there, and so did the artist: that the paintings examine the loss of innocence, that they are a caricature of original sin, that they meditate on hypocrisy, that they demonstrate human capacity to be at once good and evil. Other paintings in the exhibition depict obscure machines, whose enigmatic presence appears foreboding in the context of the toddlers and suggests an element of scientific experimentation. 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.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. Michaël Borremans's innovative approach to painting combines technical mastery with subject matter that defies straightforward interpretation. Most recently, Michaël Borremans: Fixture, was presented at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga in 2015–2016.

In his accompanying essay, critic and curator Michael Bracewell takes an in-depth look into specific paintings, tackling both the highly charged subject matter and the masterly command of the medium. Available in both English-only and bilingual English/traditional Chinese editions, this series makes the work of these important artists accessible to a wider audience. The opening of the Hong Kong space marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of David Zwirner gallery as it increases its international presence beyond New York and London. As unsettling punctuation marks Borremans also included two large paintings of industrial apparatuses. 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.

In the most evident terms, Fire From The Sun portrays children aged two or three in various stages of play with fire and what appear to be human limbs, even hair.