Luc Tuymans's painting Altar (2002) depicts a wedding chapel in a Mormon temple. It's a space that only church members are allowed to enter, so - as Ralph Rugoff recounts in the catalogue to the retrospective of the Belgian painter's work at Bozar, the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels (until 8 May) - Tuymans based the painting on a photograph taken by a surveillance camera.[*]The process, Rugoff explains, is one of 'translating this covert picture of a closed, members only area.'

LRB 14 April 2011 | PDF Download