Michaël Borremans: French Painting

French Painting is a subtly unfolding, ironic homage to the French pictorial tradition that delicately unsettles its legacy. Across the paintings in this exhibition, beauty emerges as both seductive and disturbing, suspended between tenderness and nihilism.

In the portraits in French Painting, guilt and innocence coexist in a fragile state of unresolved duality; the figures are agents of disturbance and its consequence in a world wherein sentiment and estrangement coexist. Borremans’s handling of his subjects eliminates distinctions between genres: the portrait in which identities dissolve becomes a still life, and the still life in which the subjects simmer with affective undercurrents becomes a portrait.

In Magnolia Flowers and Magnolia Flowers II (2026), cuttings of magnolia branches in a ceramic pitcher embody a tension between nature and the human impulse to dominate and control, revealing a world in which beauty and destruction are intertwined. Beauty appears as something inherently ambiguous, at once seductive and disturbing. These objects evoke a fragile memory of purity and innocence, yet appear already aestheticized, absorbed into systems of value and display.

With a distinct tension that has a haunting relevance in our time, Borremans engages in his work timeless human concerns: power, vulnerability, ambiguity, and identity, probing the instability of meaning itself.

In paintings such as Boy with Bloody Arms and Lio sitters appear both as perpetrators and as victims, generating a tension within the image to which they are simultaneously subjected. In this way, they embody a fragile and unsettling condition: agents of disturbance and, at the same time, its consequence.

The dissolving of genres, traditions, and painterly tropes in French Painting continues a decades-long inquiry of this nature, most recently presented in depth with A Confrontation at the Zoo, a retrospective of twenty years of painting presented at the Museum Voorlinden in Wassenaar, Netherlands, in 2024–25.

In Happiness, an explosive device—the surface of which is seemingly cloaked in a lustrous pink insulated quilt—takes center stage. The imagery acquires a sarcastic charge, balancing between consumer culture and existential emptiness. In Phantom, a rocket emerges as a disruptive motif. Within this visual language, objects oscillate between threat and desire, technology and projection.