“It’s a very stupid painting really, but that’s why it’s a good one,” said artist Michaël Borremans, describing his painting of a brick and a shoe.
The Belgian artist—who the New York Times said might be “the greatest living figurative painter”—is known for his unnervingly enigmatic scenes painted sensuously in oils.
Given his often-charged subject matter, Borremans was refreshingly game when asked whether he had a favorite work from his current museum survey “A Confrontation at the Zoo” at Museum Voorlinden in the Netherlands (through March 23).
“It’s like choosing a favorite child, but I personally favor that one,” he said, brightly, of the “very stupid” canvas depicting a red clay brick laid down beside a solitary men’s dark brown oxford. The painting, which has been left purposefully unfinished, is honestly self-aware. “It’s modest, but totally nihilistic. It’s nonsense,” he added. “It’d like to do more work like it.”
In some ways, the small painting offers a keyhole into Borremans’s decades-long and often provocative practice, across drawing, painting, and film. “A Confrontation at the Zoo” is a significant showing of his works, bringing together nearly 50 paintings from over 20 years of his career, drawn from European and a handful of American collections. Borremans, who was significantly involved in shaping the show, said the curation process was a welcomed “kill your darlings… severe selection” so that “the paintings don’t disturb each other, don’t eat each other.”
The effect is a mysterious music box of a world where painted people and animals appear as mute actors on a mysterious theatrical stage. The galleries are arranged loosely thematically, around the artist’s most iconic series including “’Black Mould” (2014–) works where black hooded figures dance in ritualistic fervor or “Fire from the Sun” (2017) in which cherubic toddlers appear, smeared in blood, picking through butchered body parts. Other paintings, though no less uncanny, are suspensefully quiet. Men, women, and children are pictured in unusual costumes—in medieval arming caps or shrouded under massive, pointed hoods. Their skin is curiously dewy or, maybe, glossy as porcelain.
“It’s been a very nice exercise and I think it worked very well and to my satisfaction,” said the artist, who said he enjoyed locating some of the recurring themes present in his works over the years.
The exhibition is a moment of reflection after a busy string of years for Borremans. In the summer of 2024, his works were featured in “The Monkey” at David Zwirner’s London space. That exhibition was a follow-up to his 2022 exhibition “The Acrobat” in New York. Last year, Borremans also made a brief but notable cameo in his friend the filmmaker Luca Guadagnino’s film Queer, based on William S. Burroughs’ novel.
Given his mastery of painting, it’s something of a surprise that Borremans only started painting in his mid-30s. Born in 1963 in Geraardsbergen, Belgium, he attended the Luca School of Arts in Ghent, studying photography as well as drawing and engraving. Only in the late 1990s, did he turn his attention to painting.
In Belgium, home to centuries of art by Van Eyck, Frans Hals, and René Magritte, Borremans developed his distinctive visual language, marrying the rich history of oil painting uneasily to modern anxieties with an anchronsitic seductiveness.
“My first inspirations were people like Rembrandt and especially Goya whose etchings are what made me want to be an artist when I was 15 or 16 years old,” he recalled. While the despair of Goya’s Black paintings is certainly a handy reference, Borremans’ works also draw from the Rococo and Romantic eras. Watteau and Fragonard are among the draughtsmen he admires most.
Perhaps the star painting of “Confrontation at the Zoo” is The Monkey (2023), the titular work of his 2024 London exhibition. The painting which depicts a porcelain monkey in a blue coat alludes to the legacy of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, the 18th-century French painter known as a master of the still life. Chardin made a fabulous and strange series of paintings of monkeys in the guise of human trades, including, most famously his work The Monkey Painter. These frankly bizarre compositions were part of a trend called Singerie or “Monkey Trick” paintings which gained traction in the 16th century and peaked in 18th century France (depictions of personified monkeys have existed, more generally, since ancient Egyptian times, at least). Such depictions of “singe peintre” or monkey painters, particularly, poked fun at the intellectual pomposity of the art world.
“I was putting together a show of portraits, and I thought I have to have one be a portrait of a monkey. I was looking for monkey costumes, monkey masks, et cetera. I didn’t find anything that was suitable.” he recounted. He ultimately found a porcelain monkey for sale at an auction. Borremans bought it and began a series of portraits, drawn to the monkey’s personified costume and visage.
The monkey, much like Chardin’s, is painted with intense care that is as strange as it is beautiful—which is part of the point.
“As an artist, you always want to be controversial. Marcel Duchamp wanted to be controversial. In a way you want to please, but you also want to be annoying,” said Borremans, explaining his painterly touch “Beauty is today taboo. Beauty is romantic and it’s not very en vogue so I work there”
But Borremans walks a tightrope line. “When you look at paintings of John Singer Sargent, for instance, it’s over the top. It’s too beautiful to be good in my opinion,” he said, “Whereas Chardin has a very meditative quality. where you feel his attitude and his personality.”
Girding himself against nostalgia is essential, however. “It’s totally pointless to paint a landscape or a still life or a portrait in the fashion that it was done in the 19th century. We have a different context and it has to reflect in the work,” he enthused. He describes himself as a post-conceptual artist, framed by conceptualism’s legacy. “A painting cannot be looked at as if it’s not conceptual anymore. A painting always needs a strong concept or it’s not legitimate,” he added. He acknowledges that his early forays into painting were misunderstood as sentimental.
“I was working with found imagery from the 20th century, which I wanted to have a generalizing appearance of being a human being,” he recalled. When he realized the work was being interpreted differently than he intended, he shifted the garments of his subjects to the odd out-of-eras clothing now synonymous with his paintings. “I wanted to make the context diffuse. The clothing is a bit out of time,” he said. “It’s not in the past. It’s neither in the future.”
Several years ago, the artist began taking his own photographs as source material for his paintings, making preliminary studies of compositions of light, color, and different poses in photography. “I’m already painting when I’m photographing. It’s unconventional because the photographs are uninteresting until they are deconstructed and reconstructed in another medium,” he said. “As spectators, we are conditioned to give a painting another value, another weight. We don’t see a painting solely as an image. We see it as a painting and a kind of a stage.”
His figures now often appear in a directionless studio setting, existing in the limbo of an unknown era. This withholding of information can impart a foreboding sense of disorientation, but that often holds room for discomfiting humor. His works, he feels, are a place for the emotions of life today to come to the fore. “Some artists are very literal in their depiction of current events. For me, we have that imagery already, so it’s very important to use metaphors, for instance,” he said.
“A Confrontation at the Zoo” includes several works from Borremans’s perhaps most controversial series “Fire from the Sun” from 2017. These oil-on-canvas works, across a range of scales, picture toddlers playing on desolate and empty stages, infused with insinuations of a violent aftermath. These children, beautiful and chubby, draw from the traditions of Renaissance putti or cherubs, winged babes whose origins mixed biblical angels with spirits of love and fertility rooted in the ancient Greek and Roman classical world.
At once guileless and instinctual, these figures hint at humanity’s foibles, our basic instincts. “The cultural norm is that children are very innocent and very pure. But when you spend a lot of time with young children, you see that they’re actually very vicious at times,” said Borremans. “I was thinking a lot about that. That base state of a person is very vicious.”
In 2022, these paintings were unexpectedly shot to the fore of public consciousness when Michaël Borremans’s book As Sweet as It Gets appeared in the background of a now-infamous Balenciaga campaign, accused of promoting child exploitation. Fired-up internet theorists homed in on the book and Borremans’s work, finding in his “Fire from the Sun” series, implied “evidence” for the campaign’s supposed depravity.
For Borremans, who was wholly unaware of his book’s inclusion in the campaign, the online kerfuffle was bemusing and revealing. “I was not on social media for a long time so I didn’t know about it right away,” he said, a delight in his voice. “People texted me, ‘Oh, Michaël, I’m so sorry for you!’ and ‘Keep it up, stay strong!’ I didn’t know what they were talking about. So that’s how I found out. It was so over the top, the whole thing. But for me, I didn’t mind. It was free publicity. I was finally a controversial artist—a compliment of course.”
The experience was a chance for Borremans to stand in the river of the contemporary follies and conundrums that fuel his visions, and, as part soothsayer and part jester, read the dancing shadows around him.
“That’s the challenge I think, to be a chronicler of your time and your society,” he summed up. “I don’t know if I’m succeeding. It’s for later generations to decide.”
