www.worldwidereview.com

http://www.davidzwirner.com/exhibition/luc-tuymans-allo-2/

Surprise! I really liked this show having found toyman boring since i had him shoved down my oesophagus as a student. The images, found, distanced, screens, yawn are no great shakes, but the scrubby paintwork brings them alive in pleasing ways. A bit paint but numbers but then the choice of colour and odd blending hits you like a shot of espresso, or a beer, or just something nice.

I was hoping they'd be based on old stills from TV series Allo Allo, but alas!

The Tuy Buy is a pretty slick act these days. You're right the facture carries the things, but he's also quite the tonalist and that faint glow he gives to Peaches still makes me think of Gerhard Richter's still lives. Sorry Luc but it is there. His big advantage over Richter of course is that he draws - and just enough. I think I liked it better when he worked smaller but the upscale has if anything made him work harder at the facture, and they're probably a bit easier to take for it. He can't be quite so throwaway on this scale, but he can scrub them into submission.

I guess the highlight is the Allo sequence, of which I particularly liked Allo IV and Allo III. The last one, Allo V might usefully be studied by Ofili... You can sort of tell from the framing and lighting that they're derived from film stills - for The Moon and Sixpence (1946) as a matter of fact, but the jolt between the background figures and the more photographic foreground figure makes it a strange kind of movie still. You get the thing about primitivism alright (there's a whole thesis in the PR about Modernism's projection of The Other onto the third world) but it's a primitivism the artist can't quite turn away from, anymore than the foreground figure. I don't think it's so much The Other, as the ideal, the engagingly stylised, that brazenly discards realism. You just know the artist wants to, but knows its a dream now, the past.