Location: stable no 51

Géricault has fascinated Luc Tuymans (b. 1958, Mortsel) for many years. The French painter was barely 32 years old when he died – according to some sources, he succumbed to tuberculosis, others claim an accident in a horse’s stall caused his death – and Tuymans plays into that biographical aspect by exhibiting the work in the riding stables at the hippodrome. He shows a fragment from a new stop-motionfilm.

Luc Tuymans will also present other fragments fron the same animation at Mercator.

in collaboration with Joris Van Poucke

Location: on the water (projection) and in the hall (TV screen)

In 2014, Tuymans came across the trailer of a B-film online: A Twist of Sand. In the trailer, one figure in a group of people waves a white flag, signalling surrender, after which all the characters are executed anyway. The moment directly before the execution was the inspiration for the painting The Shore. Both the trailer and the painting take turns in powering a stop motion animation, which Tuymans made in collaboration with Joris Van Poucke. Three fragments will be shown during The Raft. Art is (not) lonely: one on a flat screen on the ship, one projected onto the water in front of Mercator, and one in the riding stables at the hippodrome.

Location: the captain’s cabin

The Raft of the Medusa instantly reminded Luc Tuymans (b. 1958, Mortsel) of another iconic work based on a true story: El tres de Mayo by Francisco Goya, from 1808. To contrast the two ‘testimonies’, Tuymans displays a fictitious phantasmagoria in the captain’s cabin: a watercolour depicting a marine officer.