Since the mid-1990s Belgian artist Michaël Borremans has created a world of intriguing, enigmatic imagery in drawing, painting, and film that is unified in possessing an indefinable sense of time and place. In The Avoider Borremans directly addresses the history of painting. The lone figure embodies dichotomous signals: his manner is at once haughty and humbling-both a Flâneur of city and a shepherd of the country. Borremans's model directly quotes the pose of the figure in Gustav Courbet's great painting The Meeting, but also channels the richness of Édouard Manet's figures and John Singer Sargent's society portraits.