The fact that there is literature about pictures says nothing about the certainty of their existence or their location. The words act imperceptibly, as if they were acting as a substitute for images, as if the transition, which divides them from, that which is visible does not even exist. The pictures appear to portray themselves in a language which should really reveal their identity and visibility.
The pictures persist in their visible state, quite speechless, without a title. No colour, neither lines nor surfaces nor figuration would run through a piece of text if it spoke of yellow and blue, drawing and space. The shapes of visibility would withdraw from this powerful gesture of words, by merely determining verbal objects, originating in the sight of foreign rules. A piece of text on pictures would lose the location it depends upon and wander aimlessly through the language, and each and every attempt at approach would represent a continuation of the distance. As an invisible object, it would start with the obliteration of the images. Even if the shapes of that which is visible and speakable have no common history, no common spatial or temporal co-ordinates, in which they occur, there is an opaque pictorial and speechless space between seeing and speaking, where the pictures withdraw and the speaking does not yet begin. This space would indicate the common location at which a piece of text could coincide with pictures by - without repeating them in speech - outlining the paths which open up to the seeing required for speaking and the speaking required for seeing and which would simultaneously make its closed, irreducible duality legible. In this way, the text would search for the location of its own origin and also check the conditions of its own possibility with respect to the danger of causing its own obliteration. Maybe such a piece of text could only contain subjunctive sentences, in order to put off the decision regarding the choosing or removal of the statements made.
Painting's transition from illustration to informalism introduces its self-reflection and completes the radical division between seeing and speaking. There is currently a trend towards painters no longer painting pictures but rather turning themselves and their pictures against that which is visible.
The stigma of removal is present in the pictures of Michael Lukas and creeps into each and every pictorial stage. Because the pictures work at their own disappearance, repeatedly reaching into a world without pictures, the text continues the movement of the pictures. The engulfed borders of visibility and invisibility force into the space of the pictures itself and challenge the language to its own insecure, location-less action. If, when doing so, the pictures represent nothing other than themselves, they turn to the reflection of their visibility, to ascertain their possibilities. Pictorial processes, which otherwise only serve the creation of visibility, become double by completing a turn against themselves.
When selecting a central theme for visibility, these pictures do not complete a traditional model of reflection in the sense of placing and confirming their visibility by creating a façade for themselves. If their opposite forces entrance into this purely presupposed identity, it turns into a splintered border between visibility and invisibility. This movement, which one could call Jaques Derrida Falte, turns back on itself, misses itself, slips away and erases itself; it lays by itself, it classifies and divides simultaneously: Polyptychon (ptyche = crease) as discontinuous movement, whose development causes an irritating game of doubling, overlapping and erasing. This polyptchon is determined by two double gestures, which describe these borders of that which is visible and that which is invisible, through the gesture of bonding and dividing, as through those by pictures and deletion.
If individual objective and symbolic elements quote a model of representation, which regulates visibility in accordance with customary illustrative principles, then this model is crossed many times: rows of identifiable, legible figures are developed from the repetition of pictorial elements. A pictorial language seems to form in this recognition, the signs of which indicate towards an invisible significance. These would switch over unexpectedly from the visible to the sayable as a picture-less sign like the letters of a script. In Michael Lukas' work, displacement occurs in their serial movement: the invisible spaces, which connect signs with signs such as their significance to an identity, stretch and separate the meaning. As the similarities in a row tend to make dissimilar things visible rather than continuous unity, the bonding spaces rid themselves of their sign-producing function. The repetition fragments the elements in a radical way and intersperses them with invisible lines. It leaves the body of the picture behind, which refers to nothing else, nothing invisible but only itself. In this way it becomes visible.
The representation of that which is portrayed is erased twice: on the one hand, it appears simply as an outline, which permits an inversion from the interior to the exterior and makes its absence visible; on the other, the representation of the individual object is not retained. The insinuated identity of the true object and image becomes unstable, insecure duality, it falls so far apart that the recognisable layer is obliterated. Like the sign, the simple image would always be invisible, dark with merely imaginary visibility. Visible parts of the picture remain behind once again, drawn into the movement of images and obliteration.
If the overlaying and juxtaposition of pictorial segments can be described as basic processes in the creation of pictures, this is compounded in the work of Michael Lukas by the fact that they establish dividing lines which themselves invisibly differentiate between the perceptibility and imperceptibility of whole picture areas. The abutting edges of diptych or triptych panels form boundaries that generate a dialectic between separation and unification – between forming and extinguishing – by pushing the visible into the invisible realm, and conversely by drawing what is invisible into the visible realm. In this way, figurative elements are dissolved, while at the same time new ones are created.
A dividing line of this kind can signify both juxtaposition and superimposition: each adjoining surface can mean the obliteration of the other. In such a state of mutual neutralization, any formal concept is eliminated, since every element of a picture determines whether some other element is extinguished or not. A number of superimposed layers result in multi-level palimpsests, the outer layers of which displace deeper ones, not through their own pictorial intensity, but through an act of visual neutralization. In the process, dimly visible pictorial planes shimmer through on the borders of perceptibility or disappear beneath other layers. Images recede through various degrees of transparency, leaving behind purely material traces – traces in which scarcely any palpable visible quality remains.
As pictorial functions lose their uniform orientation, tensions between the manifold compositional elements increase, in the process of which images merge and are dispersed into fragments. This character gives way to details, which are capable of appearing as units, as well as individual plates, indeed whole pictures, whose serial openness does not stipulate a conclusion for a definitive whole. As fragments, they reveal a lack, which does not indicate a different sphere, in which this whole could occur, rather an absence, which lends presence to the disappearance of the pictorial. And in no synthetic movement of the sight would this multiplicity become one unit, nor would these fragments join to become any kind of a whole. If space, colours and figurations appear and disappear as elements of a visible absence, the sight begins to oscillate, disturbed and irritated. It would have to occupy all points of view simultaneously, in order that vision receives images, which continually withdraw.
The open system of these fragments allow a variety of combining possibilities, whose only principle pursues the maximisation of tensions along the border of visibility and invisibility. This combining process no longer ends with the “completion” of the pictures, because the combining and dividing possibilities of the plates continue to exist; likewise, every receptive view is a new shift of the visible, brought about by the relevant series creating a means of allocation, whereby the pictorial is produced, obliterated by others once again. The visible, as before, becomes an event in which it disappears.
To the extent at which the irreducible, hermetic variety draws borders around itself, they do not allow themselves to be forced into a unified product by any kind of order. These borders can only be crossed in jumps, in coincidental, abrupt movements. Between the different spheres, fragments or media, no translatability is possible without these two double gestures. This hermetic reveals itself to the words which dare to advance to the edge of that which is visible, for which, in Michael Lukas' work no titles have been formed; possibly to avoid a premature crossing and delimiting of this space free of language and images by words, possibly because they are devoured and labyrinth-like endless sections of text, and would have to name the countless occurrence of the visible like mere names.
Wolfgang Schäffner, 1989
[Translation: Peter Green]