Serax has produced a series in association with world-renowned Belgian artist and curator Luc Tuymans. The set of five gold-rimmed porcelain plates are based on Plates, a work Tuymans made in 2012 and was created at the request of paediatrician Philip Maes, founder of Simon & Odil (a non-profit organisation linked to the King Baudouin Foundation).
Dr Maes has been researching sickle cell disease (SCD), a hereditary blood disorder affecting 60 to 70,000 children each year. Dr Maes’s non-profit organization finances neonatal screenings of newborns, ensuring treatment can be started more quickly and affected children have a better chance of survival. Per set sold, Luc Tuymans and Serax donate €50 euro to the non- profit organisation.
Tuymans’ 2012 Plates series originally consisted of five lithographs. The lithographs zoom in on a single object that was already part of a painting of the same name from 2011, which consists of six distinct images of a beautifully laid table. The cutlery, wine glass and gold-rimmed plate all suggest a Central European origin. Tuymans is fascinated by the former Eastern Bloc and the contrast between communist ideology, on the one hand, and mass production of luxury goods, such as gold-rimmed porcelain plates, on the other.
For the five lithographs, he made Polaroids of his own tableware, which he has used for years at home and in his studio, each with a different light. Each sheet shows a single plate, pictured frontally and without any further context, recognizable as an individual object only by small variations in the golden rims. The plates are illuminated from different angles, creating differences in brightness and brilliance.
Tuymans worked for two years to achieve the exact same effect for a decal that is applied by hand to a bone china plate and then glazed. And so, the circle is complete: a photo of a plate becomes a real plate again with a trompe l’oeil effect. The complete set comes in a beautiful gift box, a must for every art lover.
