"Tuymans’ paintings are shot through with the kind of subtle beauty one finds in seashells when the glow of the sun has diminished and the sheen of the water has dried. Their faded sumptuousness nonetheless elicits a kind of consummate chill"
Executed in 2015, Corso I stands among the most thematically complex and visually enigmatic works in Luc Tuymans’s recent oeuvre. Dominated by the artist’s typically restrained, almost.mes lancholic palette, the painting depicts a parade float with eerie theatricality, rendered in haunting isolation. Though ostensibly drawn from a festive public ritual, the image bears the weight of absence; its surface is stripped of context, human presence, and narrative cues. Instead, Tuymans presents a spectacle untethered from celebration, frozen in a moment of disquieting stillness. The result is a paradoxical image: both grand and disintegrating, celebratory and mournful, richly detailed yet emotionally austere. Such tensions – between visibility and erasure, beauty and decay – lie at the heart of Tuymans’s practice, and are masterfully distilled in the present work.
Right: Gerhard Richter, Domplatz, Mailand, 1968. Private collects ion. Image/Artwork: © Gerhard Richter 2025
Corso I belongs to the Corso series, a group of paintings that derive their imagery from the annual flower parade in Zundert, the small Dutch town famed as the birthplace of Vincent van Gogh. For Tuymans, the subject matter holds deeply personal significance: as a child, he worked on the very floats that would later serve as models for this series. He recalls the clandestine, collaborative process of constructing these ornate displays: elaborate, ephemeral structures made over the course of six months, revealed its audiences in a single day, then promptly dismantled. This cyclical rhythm of labour, unveiling, and destruction informs the conceptual core of the Corso series. In Corso I, Tuymans distills that.mes mory into an image that both preserves and abstracts its referent: the float becomes a monument to impermanence, its visual splendour hollowed out by t.mes , loss, and detachment.
Courtesy Studio Luc Tuymans, Antwerp, and David Zwirner
Tuymans’s broader painterly approach – a studied process of distancing and degradation – serves to intensify this sense of dislocation. Working from photographic sources, which he frequently takes or finds himself, Tuymans subjects the original image to multiple stages of translation, compressing visual information into flattened shapes, muted tones, and soft-edged forms. The vibrant immediacy of a photograph gives way to a subdued and contemplative register. Corso I exemplifies this method: what may have begun as a colourful documentary snapshot is transfigured into a spectral and meditative composition. Tuymans has long avoided the use of true black in his paintings, favouring tonal subtleties achieved through mixtures such as van Dyck brown, manifesting an uneasy beauty in which the painting seduces through form while destabilising through meaning.
The Corso paintings featured prominently in Tuymans’s 2016 exhibition Le Mépris at David Zwirner in New York; an exhibition whose title referenced Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 film and, by extension, the collapse of cinematic and cultural meaning. As Tuymans explained, the notion of contempt in this context was not.mes rely emotional, but structural: a reflection of a society increasingly defined by alienation, spectacle, and the erosion of shared symbols. In this light, the float in Corso I becomes more than a vestige of local tradition; it is a cipher for a broader cultural unease. Its theatrical flourish no longer inspires delight, but rather suspicion; its exaggerated form verges on the grotesque, its silence symptomatic of a society overwhelmed with melancholia and nostalgia.
“After seeing a film I try to figure out which single image is the one with which I can remember all the moving images of the movie. Painting does the opposite; a good painting to me denounces its own ties so that you are unable to remember it correctly. Thus it generates other images. One shouldn’t be able to remember the real size of a painting because that’s the very core of its power. Before I paint, the image already exists, somet.mes s it’s an image which is memorized and so there’s a mimetic element, which could also be very filmic.”
Indeed, Corso I encapsulates many of the concerns that have defined Tuymans’s contribution to contemporary painting: a profound engagement with history and memory; a rigorous interrogation of image-making; and an unflinching sensitivity to the complexities of representation. Rooted in both personal recollects ion and collects ive cultural anxiety, the painting is emblematic of Tuymans’s ability to transform the familiar into the uncanny. As the float drifts through its spectral space – untethered, unpeopled, and unmoored – it becomes a poignant symbol of disappearance, a fleeting vision suspended at the edge of remembrance. The pageantry of the past flickers before us; not as celebration, but as a haunting trace of what was, and what can no longer be fully grasped.