Pierre Restany
L’alchimiste de l’art
Biographie autorisée
Par Henry Perier
Il fonde « le nouveau réalisme » avec Yves Klein, Arman, César, Tinguely, Christo, Niki de Saint-Phalle…
Art is corpus delicti
Lucas’ project has the dimension and scope of a legend within a legend
Since 1987, the artist has produced around thirty large format paintings on the theme of bulls and bullfighters. In each painting, a blank geometrical shape – regular or irregular – is left for the bullfighter whom the painting is modelled after. Each bullfighter is invited to paint this empty space set aside for him using scarlet-coloured paint that mirrors the bull’s blood. In a way, the space represents the pictorial soul of the composition.
These are simplified, fragmented images offering an analytical vision of a series of situations connecting man and beast. As an unbroken series, they form a kind of journey of recognition.
This is more than just a multi-faceted allegory of bullfighting. It is a rebus whose inspiration stems from the origins of the timeless tradition of human expressivity.
This geometrical shape painted by the bullfighter, which forms the painting’s semiotic crest, was found by Lucas on the walls of Lascaux. It echoes the mysterious crests, the brown and bistre-coloured criss-crossings that feature amongst the extensive repertoire of bison, aurochs and ibex forming the panoramic message of our ancestors 15,000 years ago. The aurochs is the animal king of the rupestrian language – the depiction of deer, horses and billy goats seems much slighter. The Magdalenian artist readily assigns them an almost decorative, subordinate role. The actual challenge that man takes on is the balance of power between he and the aurochs.
The bullfighter standing opposite the black bull in the ring is the direct heir to this moment of extreme tension in existential awareness, between life and death.
Magdalenian man was aware of his physical weakness in relation to the surrounding fauna. He remedied this situation using his intelligence, this specific quality that allows him to adapt to the present situation and dictates a suitable course of action for survival.
Fear gave the life of Magdalenian man its tempo – an organic, gut fear of a hostile nature and the strength of animals – in the caves, hollows and recesses of Mother Earth. There came a day when the skilful huntsman, constantly on the alert, decided to forget his fear and engrave its image, painting the object of that fear.
That day, which has been lost in the mists of time, was the day when the Magdalenian artist was born. He began to bind the ochre in the soil with the blood of the bison, using its urine as a solvent to etch the image of the enemy, of relentless danger, of the target of the hunt and the object of death on the inside walls of his shelter.
Art was born in the Magdalenian era from the instinctive drive of the huntsman who overcame anguish and fear to paint its picture and thus exorcise it from his mind.
In Lucas’ series of paintings there is the same allusion, the same obsession with the moment when existential awareness reached its climax. The power balance of the hunter mirrors that between the bullfighter and the bull. The cave has been replaced by the ring but the existential fixation of a critical moment in the space-time continuum between man and beast has remained unchanged.
There is a kind of permanency of this original, fundamental relationship between man and beast in the continuity of art, its knowledge and history.
The geometrical shape painted by the bullfighter is the soul of each painting by Lucas. This same soul can be found on the walls of the caves, thereby bringing the magic of expression full circle. Lucas has sensed the profound murmur of this age-old magic. He has felt like the contemporary of the Magdalenian artist, the original painter of earth and blood.
So, alluding to the symbolism of the colour scarlet became inadequate to encapsulate the magic of this extreme moment and Lucas too – he, the contemporary artist – sought to demonstrate his awareness of this privileged moment by using the original signs. And he too, quite naturally, used blood and the earth to welcome in the clearest, most direct way, the joy of the formidable truth that had been revealed to him. The red mark is the material evidence and the crime became art from the moment it was felt, perceived and understood by the awareness of being.
Art as material evidence
Pierre RESTANY
Art is corpus delicti.
Paris, avril 1992.
Pierre Restany, Lucas (Milan)
Lucas communicating with the spirits
Over-simplified, fragmented images offer an analytical vision of a certain number of situations.
A message is fragmented so as to make it initially unintelligible and create a kind of reconnaissance journey through semantics.
By conceptualising to the extreme the notion of the bullfighter’s collaboration, that notion becomes abstract. The red mark becomes the core of the painting. It encapsulates a surge in activity and a sublime moment of sharing. It epitomises a split second in the bullfighter’s memory which for the artist is a privileged meeting point allowing communication between spirits. It is where a series of causes materialise and connect with one another to create some form of trace. A trace that is primarily immaterial but nevertheless a tangible sign of the presence of the bullfighter on the canvas, a presence born of and directed at emotion.
This geometrical shape painted in the first instance becomes obscure and unintelligible to us. What do we know about the men who left us this red mark, this elusive shadow? And yet, this is evidence of the mystery, of the profound communication that took place. It reveals that a privileged moment did indeed occur. It is the trace left on the painting by a man, by a presence, in a sublime, indescribable moment that rises above the notion of secular time.
Pierre Restany
Paris, Mai 1992
