Martin Lukáč (*1989) is a Slovak painter living and working in Prague, Czech Republic.
Martin Lukáč
Born 1989 Slovakia
Phone: + 420 604 464 603
Chris Sharp on Martin Lukáč
The paintings of Martin Lukac exist somewhere between a rock and a hard place. Normally, such
a position would be cause for anxiety in a painter,
but Lukac inhabits this willfully liminal space with
a relative ease, even a certain grace. What precisely is this space? How to define it? For the past few years, I have been thinking about contemporary western painting in terms of two axes. One is
vertical and the other is horizontal. In the vertical axis, painting is perceived as linear and historical
in nature, progressing in the logic of a Hegelian dialectic. Essentially romantic, this axis is inhabited by practitioners determined to bring painting to its oft-heralded terminus through a logic of essence
and brinkmanship. Some of its key components include Martin Kippenberger, Michael Krebber,
Merlin Carpenter, Christopher Wool, Josh Smith, and even Joe Bradley, among others. Meanwhile, the horizontal axis operates according to a logic which is non-linear and extends indefinitely outward in both directions as if along an unbounded horizon. In this scenario, painting is endlessly renewable by virtue
of its abandonment of the historical logic of the romantic model and through being more interested in possibilities, in gaining and opening up new ground, than essences and the closure they necessarily entail. It’s a kind of brinkmanship in reverse. Some
of this mode’s more conspicuous practitioners include Amy Sillman, Laura Owens, Walter Swennen, Michael Berryhill, and Allison Katz, among others. Contrary to the current ban on gendering, I would
say that the first axis tends to be masculine, while the latter tends to be feminine, regardless of
actual gender. Of course, nothing is ever so cut
and dry– there is a bit of cross over in both camps, but generally speaking, at least in my estimation, practitioners tend to adhere to one or the other.
Not so in the case of Martin Lukac. At once
a believer and a non-believer, a romantic seeker of
endgame essences and wholly committed to new possibilities in painting, Lukac’s work somehow manages to synthesize both of the above-described axes, obliging them to coexist with something that amounts to happiness. It is a strange and improbable situation, but one which he, much to my avowed consternation (as I, for the sake of convenience, would basically like to keep these two camps separate), carries out with admirable poise. But
just how does he manage to do this? What’s his secret? Yet before trying to answer this question, I should at least try and shore up my claim by identifying these two tendencies within his work.
Lukac’s painting practice revolves largely around
the depiction of motifs. Alighting upon a given form, the simpler, the better, he depicts it, sometimes repeatedly within the same canvas, until he has essentially exhausted it. The motifs can range from modified grids, full of expressive higgledly-piggledly interiors; what looks like a shield or a coat of arms; and more recently (at the time of writing this text),
the poorly drawn profile of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. A motif, for Lukac, can also be methodical, such as in the case of his white on white paintings,
in which a series of gestures, initially applied in dark paint on a canvas, is limned over with white paint, as if to provisionally erase them. This repetition speaks to a central preoccupation within the artist’s practice, which has less to do with the act of repetition as
a formal trope than how it functions and what it signifies. Given the gestural nature of Lukac’s work, it would seem that expression or expressiveness would be important to him, but that expressiveness, whose value typically lies within its singularity, is patently negated by Lukac’s will to repeat that gesture, and with it, its singularity. And yet, his repetitions are not purely conceptual, but wield an aesthetic charge, as
if to emphasize, to embolden, and underline the fact (and facture) of painting and its essential structure.
The deployment of a motif has a specific function
as well. Akin to Josh Smith, the depiction of a given motif, the more banal the better, also expressly and pointedly serves to bracket subject matter. It is not so much the subject of the painting, as it is a kind
of circumlocution, or better, a pictorial subterfuge which at once points away and to itself, ultimately acting as a facilitator. However, unlike Josh Smith, Lukac’s work is not driven by an endgame, I-can’t- go-on-I’ll-go-on logic. For all its humor and apparent will to deflate the high seriousness of painting
(e.g., the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle) it is totally committed to painting as a craft, practice, and way
of negotiating art history. There is an earnestness
to Lukac’s work, a shameless desire to create
good paintings, which is hard to locate in Josh Smith’s work, which is somehow always and already repudiated by virtue of the fact that there is no quality control, no hierarchy between “good” and “bad” painting. It is all the same to him. I would argue that it is precisely here that Lukac manages to synthesize the two above mentioned tendencies. Where Smith brackets to terminate, Lukac brackets to renew.
The same could be same for Lukac’s commitment
to essences, to pairing down. Typically, painting as essence, post-Kippenberger, is not so much about breaking ground, but rather about running it aground. The reductive impetus is generally terminal, which
no one knows and does better than Michael Krebber. Homing in on and stoking the death drive of painting, Krebber seeks to push it to a point where the result
is always just barely a painting– as if it were on life support, nonchalantly hanging on for its dear life. Lukac on the other hand, when painting monochrome or duo-chrome, is not so much interested in the intrinsic fatality of the medium than in the possibilities that simplicity can afford him. Unlike Krebber and
his crew, Lukac’s paintings never elicit strong doubts about their ontological status as paintings, but always
Chris Sharp on Martin Lukáč
revel in their status as such, no matter how paired down they might be. They are always undoubtedly paintings, and are shameless exult in the fact.
Both of these instances serve as examples of Lukac’s rare ability to synthesize two seemingly diametrically opposed tendencies in contemporary painting. How he arrives at this unique position is another discussion altogether. But I wonder if it
has to do with that fact that he studied in Prague, where continues to live and work. Removed from the geographical loci– New York, London or/and Berlin– of these debates, he necessarily experiences them at a distance, often through images on line and in reproduction. This is not to say that he is unaware of these debates, but that by the time they reach him, they soften, forfeiting their sharp edges, become more amendable to mingling in a general discussion about painting, which Lukac, as an outsider, or
a kind of interloper, is more than happy to listen to, singularly transforming the whole of it at will.
Text: Chris Sharp