When I first saw Robert Lucander’s paintings, there was an alternation of feelings of like and dislike. They will still vary and fluctuate, although now they remain on the side of liking. There is thus something dynamic about these works.
At first sight, they look efficient, clear-cut, smart. These shining, clear-cut abstractions would work anywhere, laying claim to their own space, making it cool. They appear to be nostalgically modern, fresh and new in a good old-fashioned way.
But there was nothing old-fashioned about Lucander’s early works, even though they revelled in the modern means of painting of which a major part had been created well before Lucander was born. Running pigments, large effective planes of colour, the fascination of perfectly smooth texture, the fading of a personal hand before the direct colourism of the painting were all part of the tradition that is perceived through the great modern American painters, Barnett Newman, Cluford Still and Ad Reinhardt. They sought to take painting to an extreme, with no reference to any banally random visible world, but neither with any feigned metaphysics.
But then I began to have doubts. Is Lucander deep and noble-minded enough, or is he just making a good-looking surface without any particular message? Is he nevertheless repeating himself? How long could one bear to look at these works?
So conditioned we are to thinking that only the visible mark of the brush is honest, genuine and internalized. Or that straightforward profundity and sublimity will nonetheless require a background of seriousness and a cult of solitude.
But when I found myself doubting Lucander’s authenticity, I also noticed that I was addressing my own conception of what is genuine. Who says that these paintings with their immediate appeal could not be honestly genuine?
Lucander, however, is definitely an authentic painter: careful, precise, never sloppy, going further and further in his work. But is he honest, creating paintings only by toying with them? Where do Lucander’s genuine nature, originality or authenticity come forth?
Perhaps specifically in a straightforwardness that is not constructed with any easy directness. Living in the recent art world of Germany he could not avoid a certain contagion of conceptual art, even though he still wants to keep the expressive channels of his painting open to express what is best expressed with it: images that nonetheless obtain meaning from being made individually and by hand.
Lucander’s authenticity is in some way straightforward, but something should be known of it in order to understand just how straightforward it is. Lucander moved to Berlin to study art at the turn of the 1990s, immediately after the major political changes, and at the time he still used certain East German paints that were not appreciated in terms of quality in serious painting. The pigment alone was a concrete message related to life.
At the time Lucander was working in an atmosphere of painting where the power of German neo-expressionism had dissolved and one alternative was to return to the American-derived tradition of effacing the hand of the artist and of emphasizing surface, and its conceptualization. The most sensible thing was to treat the painting solely as a two-dimensional plane of colour: Lucander dripped paint and painted with his slippers to avoid the hand of the artist. He ground and sawed the surface of the paint to make it visible. He turned the stretcher-frame painting around to show that it also had a surface on the reverse.
So I gradually began to like Lucander’s devious honesty, authenticity, his no-nonsense attitude, in which the epithets of concrete and definitely abstract painting that often remain obscure are taken a mite too concretely, with something new discovered in the process.
"Dumb questions" of this kind that people are so often encouraged to pose in all kinds of brainstorming sessions are annoyingly often just that – dumb questions. But Lucander’s certain, clear-headed high-artist stance, his ability to draw frank conclusions in his paintings, is in turn mostly intelligent. He makes the images of painting concrete and understandable by presenting their structure and connection with the world, quite simply through the colours of the material and our environment (industrial pigments), the concrete history of the painting (the inevitable spread of paint) or the structure of the painting (displaying the stretcher frame).
And just when I had learned to like Lucander’s paintings, he began to paint in a different way.
Expressiveness is only on the surface
When images appeared in Lucander’s works about six years ago, it was not, however, as difficult a transition as could be imagined.
The same was repeated in my attitude, but perhaps now at a slightly faster pace, without holding back. I first noticed the efficient topicality of the paintings, again that coolness, when Lucander reused pictures of models and beautiful people cut from magazines in the world of his paintings.
And then that feeling came again. Was Lucander really saying anything, or was he again just showing the surface for the sake of its seductiveness? Was he again repeating himself?
Lucander’s painted images are chosen from among those of the mass media. Here, too, he very clearly takes the same kind of step that took place in American, and thereby all West European, painting when it moved to pop art after abstractionism. The artist does not create everything on canvas, but makes a choice from among the large array of existing images. For a moment this, too, seemed like something that had already been done.
But in the case of Lucander, the change seems to be more logical than the historical transition from abstract American painting to pop art. He had already proceeded from existing elements: industrial pigments, the concept of the ground, given as a condition in painting, or how paint in general can spread.
These new images of public figures were also elements of painting that come to us living in Western culture - and thus to Lucander as well – of their own accord, as something given.
And Lucander is again very concrete with his material. He carefully studies the persons that the German, Finnish and American magazines presented as only flat emblems of themselves, showing how these people in reality adopted certain gestures and postures. Human relations of some kind can even be read between them. In this case it does not matter that Lucander may have chosen the figures in the same painting from disparate sources, and that the people behind the image may perhaps never have met each other.
Lucander purifies the background of these figures without a background by painting it into a "pure" painterly colour, and by letting the faces of the figures mark themselves in a different way on the pure wooden surface – pure in its "honesty". These people, too, express emotion with their facial features, or at least the viewer reflects human emotional relations onto these authentic skin-like wooden surfaces.
Lucander says that he seeks to present what is understandable. And so he does. In Lucander’s paintings everything of significance is always clearly visible, a lesson learnt from the great solitary painter heroes of the 1950s. But this does not ensure the one-dimensionality of the work. For Lucander it is not too clear for everything to be clear and understandable.
An old model with new eyes
Shunning Lucander’s model figures or happily celebrating parties after my first infatuation, I noticed, however, that I looked very carefully at the presentations of these persons, as if looking for real, authentic people in these depictions that I condemned as contrived. I noticed that I was again forced to address my own ideas of honesty and authenticity. A model who is celebrating cannot be authentic.
Or perhaps he can. They all have human features, and relations than can be sensed will unavoidably form between the people placed in the same paintings. Lucander raised these to become the elements of his painting with a very distinct and precise manner of depiction, drawing with a lead pencil. But he does not want a new image that will be reproduced; he wants to make a more authentic image drawn by hand. Lucander wants to stop the rapidly spinning chain of simulation for a moment.
"The time for parties is now over", says Lucander. His new paintings are increasingly deeper analyses of human relations, even of the oppressive things that are expressed even by gestures purged of all context. Just as the public persons of magazines are removed from the everyday sphere to be placed in the pure sphere of relations, gestures and appearances. Every reader-viewer, however, will create even major narratives of their situations and relationships in this background-free state of the news photo. Lucander takes into use this new means of perceiving. By transferring that information into the world of the painting, those images will begin to express something that characterizes people at a very general level instead of their appearance.
Lucander may not care to celebrate these people; it only seems that would like to take a closer look at them.
Herein lies an important difference with archetypal Warholian pop painting that was fascinated by the meaninglessness of images or the plain excitement of familiarity devoid of any content or interpretation. It was fascinated by the way familiar images looked only and solely like familiar images, and were therefore brilliant. Lucander’s images ultimately force one to take a look at how those images actually are familiar, and whether something else underlies their familiarity.
Lucander is a rare painter also in the sense that his painting reacts very quickly to the outside world. It does not necessarily lag far behind the magazines whose images he uses. He does not wait for images that have become iconized. When Helmut Kohl was embroiled in his political crisis, Lucander painted his picture, almost in real time. Lucander studies the gestures of politicians, how they, too, as people are signalling something, consciously and unconsciously.
The problem of contemporary urban man, sensitive to trends, conscious of the variations of gesture and having a keen eye, is how to be convinced of one’s own emotions, or anyone else’s. Are even their expressions just learned poses? Lucander, however, appears to present some kind of consolation. Perhaps it is precisely that which is visible that can be the most significant and most authentic thing.
Pessi Rautio
