Luc Tuymans debuts his largest ever paintings at Venice’s majestic San Giorgio Maggiore Basilica

When Luc Tuymans was invited to temporarily replace two paintings by Renaissance master Jacopo Tintoretto at Venice’s San Giorgio Maggiore Basilica, the Belgian artist agreed on the basis that, 'they would never be religious.' Working with a speed reminiscent of Tintoretto – nicknamed il Furioso for the urgency with which he applied paint to canvas – Tuymans completed his largest ever paintings, each measuring nearly twenty foot in length, in just one month.

For decades, San Giorgio has been commissioning contemporary artists to present work within its celebrated architecture, but unlike the imposing standalone works by previous artists, including Anish Kapoor, Sean Scully or Berlinde de Bruyckere, Tuymans’ intervention feels more subtle and site specific. As he himself remarks of the new paintings: 'they're not in an unexpected place, but they are unexpected in their place.'

With his characteristically understated and enigmatic figurative style, Tuymans is no stranger to engaging with historical narrative, albeit through an indirect, often allegorical approach. In Venice, his aversion to the 'megalomania' and 'bombast' of the 16th century Palladian church has generated two paintings which, in their quiet and secular style, offer a visual respite to their imposing surroundings.

Located on opposite sides of the Basilica’s presbytery, Tuymans’ paintings take the place of Tintoretto’s The Last Supper, and The People of Israel in the Desert, while both undergo conservation on-site. In Heat (both works 2025), Tuymans has filled the canvas with glowing red orbs, taken from an advertisement for heat lamps that he found online. The fiery incandescence of the painting is juxtaposed by Musicians, in which two distorted figures emerge like spectres from an enveloping gloom. Taken from a photograph Tuymans took while travelling in Korea last year, the scene alludes to the fragmentary nature of memory and the delicate balance between presence and absence.

'What interested me is that one painting obliterates the other,' says Tuymans. 'So when asked if there would be a religious connotation, I did say purgatory and hell. In churches there's also an element of temperature which I find interesting. When they are lit, a lot of paintings in this church are visible but otherwise you virtually don't see them, so I wanted to create a real contradiction within this framework.'

By his own admission, Tuymans shares a 'very difficult relationship with Italy and the Renaissance', in part due to his veneration of early Flemish painting, especially Jan Van Eyck, and the Gothic architecture seen in the cathedral of his hometown of Antwerp. Unlike that cathedral, which Tuymans refers to as a 'bendable structure' owing to the bent wood used in its construction, 'the Renaissance is absolute in its take on reality and on dogma within a religious framework.'

At San Giorgio Maggiore, Tuymans’ paintings embody this juxtaposition, simultaneously exuding an understated aura that refuses to fully reveal itself on first viewing and a moody ambiguity that feels conspicuous in the context of the church’s absolutism. Like the two Tintoretto’s, these works are concerned with destabilising the gaze - albeit in a more minimalist language. And like Tintoretto, Tuymans engages with the sublime, but from a distinctly non-religious approach that nonetheless evokes comparable feelings of transcendence.

Luc Tuymans, Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore Venice until 23 November 2025