Luc Tuymans was never interested in painting religious scenes. But as we stand by the altar in the Basilica di San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, studying his two new paintings, he can’t help but wonder: ‘If you have to make a religious connotation? Purgatory and Hell.’ He looks around the vast marble hall, taking in the giant columns and the dark, ornate wooden carvings – by the 16th-century sculptor Albert van den Brulle, who, like Tuymans, was from Antwerp – that loop around the presbytery. The grandeur of the building doesn’t intimidate Tuymans. ‘I kind of like it better than the white cube,’ he confesses. ‘You have to go into confrontation with it, see how the work holds out.’
The works in question were commissioned by the Benedicti Claustra Onlus, the non-profit branch of the Abbey of San Giorgio Maggiore, and the Germany-based Draiflessen Collection, to replace Tintoretto’s The Last Supper and The Israelites in the Desert (1591–92) while they undergo restoration. The two vast canvases normally flank the impressive Renaissance altarpiece, with its golden globe held aloft by four bronze Evangelists, but from May until November, thanks to Tuymans, a very different spectacle awaits. Though he was bound to the dimensions of the original Tintorettos due to their wooden supporting structures, this supposed constraint played into one of Tuymans’s theories about art: ‘Painting is a form of limitation.’ In any case, these are two of his largest paintings to date. (‘There’s a larger one coming up,’ he says with a smile.)