Structural Omission vs. Tuymans and Borremans

Strategic Indeterminacy and Its Limits

Luc Tuymans and Michaël Borremans are often associated with what critics call strategic indeterminacy. Their paintings hover between legibility and opacity, offering just enough information to provoke speculation but never enough to resolve it. The viewer is left with atmosphere, tone, and the sense that something is being withheld. This has been celebrated as a form of postmodern realism, images that avoid delivering a clear, linear narrative.

Structural Omission is Not Ambiguity

Structural Omission is not strategic indeterminacy. It is not built on mood or narrative gaps designed for the viewer to fill. Where Tuymans and Borremans leave narrative space for interpretation, I begin with omission as an active structural principle. The painting is not incomplete. It is complete because the omission is integral to its architecture. The gaps are not accidents or mysteries to decode. They are the form.

Moving Beyond Tuymans and Borremans

Tuymans’ brushwork, with its hazy, soft quality, gestures toward history and collective record, often rooted in photographic sources. Borremans stages cryptic scenes that feel cinematic, as if pulled from a film with no beginning or end. Both lean on the idea of an implied story outside the painting, the sense that something exists elsewhere. As Hal Foster has argued, Tuymans’ opacity often functions as a form of historical critique, the image gesturing toward records it can never fully deliver. Structural Omission departs from this mode entirely; its omissions are not gestures toward the withheld or the unsaid, but the very framework of the painting. Their work invites projection beyond the frame, evoking scenarios that remain suspended.

Structural Omission takes a different stance. I am not pointing toward a fuller story beyond the image. I am saying that the full story does not exist. The painting is built to reveal the limits of knowing, to show how much of what we see is projection. In works like Red Rope, Pedestal and Power, the objects—a pedestal, a red rope, a power outlet—look staged, almost symbolic. Yet they resolve into nothing fixed. The viewer’s instinct is to search for narrative coherence, but the structure resists being reduced to a singular reading.

The Viewer’s Reflex as Subject

I am not hiding meaning. I am making visible the mechanism of our need for meaning. Rather than creating atmospheric uncertainty, Structural Omission engineers conditions where the act of interpretation becomes part of the encounter—where the viewer catches themselves assembling a whole that was never there.

Perceptual Limits as Framework

This is why I describe it as disrupted realism. The image is rendered with precision, yet its clarity is interrupted by structural design. You are not given the satisfaction of a whole. The omission is not an effect—it is load-bearing, the very framework of the painting.

Where Tuymans and Borremans leave open-ended questions, I build structures that challenge the premise that answers are possible without viewer projection. For me, that is the most direct position: no image, no matter how finely painted, can contain the totality of what we know, or who we are.

Structural Omission starts there. Where indeterminacy suspends meaning, Structural Omission declares that no totality exists to be found. It begins from that limit, building clarity and disruption into the frame.

Related distinctions
This essay is part of a series on what Structural Omission is not. See also:
Structural Omission is not Non-Finito
Structural Omission is the Opposite of Surrealism