To sleep or not sleep on a painting? Imagine a room full of paintings. It can be any room: a white cube, a cellar, with a bed. Paintings pack the walls. Every bit of wall space is squeezed to an inch of its life. If a wall is part of the world, then what is a wall full of paintings? Is a painting just playing pretend? A cover up? In more ways than one! What we know is, a painting is a thing made up of its becoming a thing. To assume a painting is unfinished is missing the point of its intrinsic and existential becoming. A painting is composed, constructed, built, layered to become a thing that is becoming a thing. A painting’s end is arbitrary and necessary. A #wip is a tautology. A painting is always becoming. How far it becomes is up to the painter. The way in which it becomes is also up to the painter. The becoming always starts slow, a struggle to become the thing it is becoming. Colour here, tone there, heavy, light, transparent, a drip caught dropping. Painting becomes its becoming. A good painting is information dispensed in different directions, thicknesses, tones, colours, awkward adjustments towards a thing becoming without ever becoming the thing. A painting is not a wall; a painting conceals a wall; a wall being the world, a painting being… temporary. The painter stops. Why? Who knows. The painter could have kept going. Maybe painting is the transformation of time into H x W x L. Why is a novel the length it becomes? Culture has a length, a limit, a breadth. Words & music could go on forever, but culture has to become a thing that never becomes. Paintings are becoming things. That’s their thing. Becoming. Upon waking Forrest Bess painted his visions without gratuitous flourishes. He was a pragmatic visionary. He was not a dreamer. Luc Tuymans never sleeps on a painting. His paintings become a thing infinitely becoming in a day — no more, no less. 8 hours of interposed sleep would only torment the real time it took for his paintings to become something that is becoming. This seems reasonable, realistic, real. In the end painting becomes its becoming. But what is a painting that ends in the pursuit of becoming? Are Tuymans’s paintings still becoming when the painter sleeps? Does he wake to see them anew, perfect? Or does the painter merely tolerate them, like other people that can’t be moulded to our liking? Paintings are subjects not objects no matter what the cover story of the art market says. We could pass the buck & say the viewer finishes off the painting; the painting’s elan vital is the viewer jerking off in front of the painting after all the edging towards becoming has been done by the painter. Painting is maturbation. Painting is durational. Paintings are not like Michael Heizer’s City or Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Paintings, in their becoming, have a lifespan. What we are presented with in a painting is something that represents time & becoming. Paintings are small fires, small lives. Some of Frank Auerbach and Howard Hodgkin’s paintings may span the lifespan of an adolescent in numbers, but they took the time it takes a paint-leaden brush to swipe across a canvas. Painters don’t dream.

📸Luc Tuymans in his studio, not sleeping, or dreaming.