Michaël Borremans's unsettling paintings inhabit a wartime world that is familiar and alien, old and new, writes Aidan Dunne
An initial glance around Michaël Borremans's exhibition The Performance at the Royal Hibernian Academy Gallagher Gallery might well inspire the feeling that something isn't quite right. Borremans, born in 1963 in Geraardsbergen in Belgium and resident now in Ghent, is a painter. His work is representational, very skilfully made in the conventional sense of the term and, superficially at least, easily comprehensible in that when he paints a hand you're pretty sure you're looking at a hand. And yet, at the same time, there really is something not quite right about his paintings.
The feeling of unease they generate stems partly from their surface qualities. Although they are demonstrably well painted, there is something feverish or over-ripe about Borremans's preferred finish - an odd, sickly pallor. Odder still perhaps is that he was only born in 1963 - look at his paintings, and the hushed gravity of their shared mood, the styles of clothing and coiffure evident in them and their worn, faded whites and muted colours all seem to place them in an era long before he was born.
Practically everything about them is redolent of the 1930s or 1940s, and perhaps of the second World War. At times they vividly evoke the peculiar, claustrophobic world of the back-room boffin, which was given distinctive cinematic form in the Powell-Pressburger adaptation of Nigel Balchin's novel The Small Back Room, in which a disaffected scientist tries to unravel the secrets of a new kind of German bomb. Borremans's protagonists are never engaged in anything as identifiably coherent as that, but there is an air of bureaucracy and experimentation about what they do.
They sometimes wear overalls, lab coats or aprons. They are subdued and focused and inhabit a shadowy, internal world. They tinker carefully with tiny bits of stuff, and do things to other people that may be a bit unpleasant. But generally we never see what exactly they are doing. The object of their attention often remains outside the frame, off-screen.
What happens is that Borremans taps into a quasi-recognisable vein of imagery related to that wartime world when, in an atmosphere of uncertainty and menace, populations were mobilised and all manner of obscure enterprises were undertaken, some of them sensible and utilitarian, some of them secret, some of them sinister and horrible. Yet he doesn't use up the potential meanings of his paintings by making explicit accounts of documented events from the second World War years in Europe. In fact the evidence suggests that he keeps one foot in the present, if not very obviously or overtly.
Although we might presume that a representational painting will faithfully reflect a coherent reality, that is not always the case here. While the situations and actions we see in the pictures recall familiar situations or actions, and can come across as being almost familiar, on closer inspection they often turn out to be bewilderingly obscure. In The Pupils, what could be a row of trainee optometrists bends over a row of patients, looking into their eyes. But look again and you see narrow white beams connecting the eyes of the pairs of optometrists and patients, like attenuated tear drops.
Again and again Borremans evokes tableaux from everyday life - albeit life at a remote, retrospective distance - and then proceeds to give them a surreal, perplexing twist. This twist can extend to the fabric of the paint itself. He uses paint as if it is a skin, and in a work such as Anna, a three-quarters length view of a woman in red, paint and skin blend disturbingly. Anne holds her hands in front of her and regards them with concern. Her arms and forearms appear discoloured, perhaps burnt, but the quality is ambiguously embodied in the configuration of the paint rather than represented per se. That is, she is not so much burnt as half-painted. She is looking questioningly at the medium of her own incarnation. This is difficult to describe, and both fascinating and unsettling to see.
In another piece not included in the present show, The Mill, a sketchily indicated figure is drawing a windmill onto the bare back of another figure. More dramatically, in Four Fairies four women engaged in some obscure activity merge disconcertingly with the surface of the table they are working at. This seems to refer directly to representational illusion: the figures emerge from a flat surface at the whim of their artist-creator. Such pictures clearly refer to the possibilities and limitations of artistic enterprise and to the medium of painting itself.
Add and Remove features a hand reaching to take or replace one of a row of painted trees, apparently taped to a flat surface. This idea of anonymous workers arranging a model reality stems most directly from work for a 2003 exhibition, Trickland, featuring paintings in which teams of people are engaged in arranging or studying what look like scale models of expanses of rural landscape. They unmistakably recall documentary images of military planners charting the course of battles. We learn that they were inspired by something similar - by images of model landscapes constructed to train bomber pilots in the second World War. The subdued, intent figures in the paintings seem to be directing not battles but (arguably) lives, as implied in a pendant to Add and Remove, in which diminutive figures take an evening stroll amid the painted or model trees: an imaginary landscape with real dragons, so to speak. There is the underlying suggestion that artists must deal with reality and have significant historical responsibilities.
RHA Director Pat Murphy argues that by situating a great deal of his imagery so far out of his own time - so much in a copiously documented historical past - Borremans is actually commenting on the current condition of painting itself. That is, painting, so often dismissed as exhausted and irrelevant, "is not of or for this era". But it's a liberating condition. Freed from the demands of fashion, "its integrity, sensuality and poeticism have greater liberty". Yet it is also possible to interpret some of Borremans's pictures as arguments for the contemporary relevance of painting, or arguments that painting cannot shed its responsibilities in that regard.
Studies of broken or fragmented ornamental figures imply that painting transcends the decorative. His obsession with tables - if it's fair to describe it as an obsession - reinforces the notion that he is interested in the idea of the potential of the painted surface. Time and again he depicts some of his groups of dutiful workers preparing pristine surfaces - as in One at a Time - entranced by them, as in The Spell, or, elsewhere, poised above them or gathered gravely around them.
The show's title painting The Performance, is a tricky celebration of surfaces that declines to give very much away. A sheet - of canvas? - is draped over a box-like shape. The sheet is reflected in the polished floor which, like the table tops, is also synonymous with the painted surface for Borremans, one suspects. The sheet sags around the framework of the top of the box, and this top takes the form of the back of a canvas stretcher. That is, we can see the pattern of the supporting crossbars that brace the rectangular stretcher. But what we cannot see is what is in the box, so to speak, in that concealed space beneath the draped sheet. Painting retains its secrets, and the conjuror slips away, the mysteries within his box of tricks unsolved.
Michaël Borremans's exhibition, The Performance, is at the Royal Hibernian Academy Gallagher Gallery until August 28th. Admission is free, 01-6612558
