4PM derives from a painting first shown in the exhibition The Twenty Seventh of January Two Thousand and Eleven in the Zeno X gallery in Antwerp. The image was created in a hotel room in Malmö, where Tuymans was staying in December 2009 in connection with the preparations for his exhibition Against the Day, which had already been seen in the Wiels Centre for Contemporary Art in Brussels.
The curtains filter the light of the city on which the winter’s night has fallen: the street lights and the car headlights cast empty reflections. Tuymans translates this image into a palette of the venomous colors that are his hallmark. In spite of the absence of light – it is night-time – an unusually colorful picture emerges of vertical pastel stripes alternating with the dark folds of the curtains. The framing folds the window to form a trapezium and confers a strange effect on the image. This hotel room does not exude any warmth. The atmosphere is one of melancholy and loneliness. A room without a view.