Borremans’ anthropomorphic paintings distorted monkey faces have the appearance of porcelain dolls. Alone, they would have been unremarkable. Borremans, however, places these eerie animal portraits next to his only slightly odd pictures of humans. This does to the human figure what Pierre Huyghe’s ape did with the absence in his Human Mask film.

The comparison unnervingly accentuates his people’s outre-mer characteristics. Some seem medieval, others come from Hollywood Westerns. This company gives even an entirely straightforward female nude a set of otherworldly qualities that she alone could not bear.

Borrowings from 17th-century court portraiture mix with 1980s pop. Borremans toys with his subjects, his audience, and with art history. His monkeys quite literally do so with them all when they appear as giant overlords of human life modelled at plaything scale in the painter’s already modestly sized pictures.