The way in which Tuymans's paintings are displayed turns The Rumour, this solo exhibition by the Belgian artist, into an installation. The works seem to speak to one another across the space and create a dialogue with the viewer. He knows how to place his paintings - how to cluster them and keep them apart, how to turn the whiteness of the walls into a somnolent, dramatic silence.
Tuymans has always been concerned with history. His exhibition at the current Venice biennale explores the legacy of Belgian colonialism in the Congo. (It should have won a prize, but an ill-advised jury feared it would send out the wrong signals about the viability of painting as a medium.) And other groups of works have dealt with the mindset of nazism, the Holocaust, Belgian collaboration, child abuse, secrets and guilt. But though they are charged with an eerie atmosphere of viciousness, sarcasm, lassitude and tenderness, his paintings speak in a quiet, unsettling, restrained, even unexpressive voice. He approaches his subjects at a tangent, and the result is the same atmosphere of loaded, fraught banality as those apparently inconsequential, moments in The Sopranos when nothing happens, but you become aware of a mentality struggling with itself.
The Rumour is a group of paintings about pigeons. Scrofulous pigeons pecking about a pavement; a lone carrier pigeon with a message on its leg (the picture, or maybe the pigeon, is called Dracula); pigeons' eyes, with that dumb, avian alertness; the bars of an empty pigeon cage. This last, extremely large painting is based on a model that Tuymans built in his studio. The bars fill the dirty black canvas, and something is moving about beyond them, but you can't tell what. And you don't know which side of them you're on.
On the end wall is a lone portrait, a typically laden image of an undoubtedly unpleasant man, looking smug and proprietorial. He seems to wear a badge on his collar. Knowing Tuymans's work, you imagine it to be a Nazi pin, or the insignia of the neo-fascist Vlams Block. Or, says Tuymans, it could be just a blob of pigeon shit. The man looks across the gallery, owning everything, to a painting of a figure bending over. The bare back is a horribly vulnerable lumpen shape in sagging underwear. You can't tell the sex of the figure, but you're aware of that portrait behind you, fondling the body with his painted eyes, as though this person belonged to him, along with all those pigeons with their matted hackles and warm, greasy chests.
Until October 13. Details: 020-7930 5373.
