Michaël Borremans: The Performance

A plastic cap is placed carefully over a prim woman's hair. Three men wearing lab coats bend intensely over an equal number of women, examining their pupils. Two serious, smart women contemplate a white table. A man in a suit and tie smirks lightly while holding pairs of red spheres, perhaps cherries, between his fingers. A middle-aged schoolmarm sketches a windmill on the naked back of a small, brown-haired child. The figures in Micha'l Borremans's enigmatic paintings are for the moment preoccupied with a meticulous task. For how long, one wonders, have they been doing this, and for how long will they continue? The viewer, so accustomed by now to looking at everything quicker and quicker still, cannot help but look ever more deeply into these mesmerizing, puzzling oils. Borremans has caught his subjects in action, totally committed and concentrated, and they demand as much from the viewer. But no matter how close one looks, no real specificity is discernible in the depicted characters; notions of concrete time and place are dissolved in neutral tones of taupe and ochre. The vagueness of their middle-class restraint triggers a world of mildly ironic mystery, worthy of further contemplation.