Antwerp artist Luc Tuymans creates fresco on walls of the Louvre (Antwerp)

Luc Tuymans was commissioned by the Louvre to paint a fresco. The four-part ‘L’orphelin’ will be on display there for one year. It appears in the Rotonde Valentin, near the Flemish masters.

Jan Fabre and Wim Delvoye have previously been guests there, and this month Luc Tuymans will be working in the Louvre. He will create a four-part fresco cycle. With the work he realizes in situ, the Paris museum marks “the return of the act of painting within and on the walls of the Louvre,” according to a press release.

Tuymans is not up to his task with this assignment. He has already created temporary murals on numerous occasions. He painted his first fresco for the MSK in Ghent in 2017, which is part of the museum’s permanent collection. Arena is inspired by the oeuvre of Francisco Goya and based on an older work from 1978.

As usual, this time Tuymans has chosen images that he keeps in his archive and then edits. Three of the images represent the cleaning of the painter’s palette, with the pigments on it. The fourth part, which inspired the title of the cycle, is a reconstruction of a work that Tuymans painted in 1990 and which was lost. It shows the back of a doll’s head, with an open neck.

L’orphelin (‘The Orphan’) refers to the museum as a ‘school for the eye’, a source of inspiration for artists by artists, a place where academy students passed by to make copies. The museum is, according to Tuymans, “a creative territory that is still very much alive today”.

The four-part cycle will be at eye level. In this way, like easels, he evokes an experience of painting that is direct, frontal and fleeting.

L’orphelin is a temporary job. In May next year, the rotunda will be repainted and “returned to the collections of the Louvre”. The room, the Rotonde Valentin, named after the painter Valentin de Boulogne, is located between the Sully and Richelieu wings. For years the famous cycle was also located here The four Seasons by Nicolas Poussin.