Luc Tuymans @ Talbot Rice Gallery

For his first Scottish exhibition, revered Belgian artist Luc Tuymans displays his own paintings of canaries and a stool alongside two portraits by Sir Henry Raeburn. These works by the popular painter of important Enlightenment society and thinkers were selected by Tuymans from Edinburgh University’s vast art collection.

The large painting of a stool is rendered in a way that suggests photographic overexposure and high contrast. Along with the muted colour, these keywords have defined Tuymans’ almost 40-year career. As source imagery, he has used an image from The American Woman’s Encyclopedia of Home Decorating.

The lengthy exhibition text avers that what’s going on here is Tuymans drawing attention to women’s role in the Enlightenment. There’s something too obvious about an image of an empty bench set across from Raeburn’s austere sitters filling their chairs. Painting is made the means of lyrical or cynical repeating of historical exclusions, rather than a means of redress.

This strategy of oblique reference and heavy-handed juxtaposition continues at the back of the room. There, a medium sized and sketchy painting of Mount Rushmore is intended to incorporate recent historical arguments that relate the Scottish Enlightenment and the American Constitution. As a quick allusion, it’s somewhat obscure and underdeveloped.

There’s an appreciable change of subject-matter upstairs. Find here enlarged Polaroids of place-settings, small models of drum sets and Tuymans’ own studio. As a one-liner, there’s a painting of theoriser of ideal prison design and optimum supervisory tactics, Jeremy Bentham’s eyes. Perhaps all this quoting and referencing comes across as too casual. There’s a lack of sharp irreverence and as a methodology, it quickly becomes trite.

Insensitivity on Tuymans’ part to the kind of hermeneutic concerns of painterliness and technique is not inherently objectionable. Superficial reference-making and pretended conceptuality, however, leaves all the purported profundity inevitably truncated.