A Japanese unrolls a scroll with a picture to show his guest and hangs it in a tokonoma or alcove for joint study. On a festive day in the Middle Ages, the gonfalon (a banner) is borne through the town. In Byzantium, a person opens a folding winged altar. All these actions are forms of presenting painting as an event.
Michael Lukas 's earliest work was a book consisting of 124 loose leaves between wooden covers and tied together with hemp cords. The observer unties the cord, opens the cover and determines the order in which he will look at the sheets. His experience of the images is one of dis-covery. Obliged by the act of undoing and opening the book to prepare himself for the appearance of the pictures, the observer becomes aware of the opening of the visual spaces – like the intervals of time in viewing them – and begins to control the process of perception.
The icon bears a metal covering. Klimt painted planar ornament over his nudes. In silent film, shots were developed in which the screen is almost completely blacked-out, with only tiny areas bearing an image. Early works by Michael Lukas bear superimposed wooden grilles, and certain areas are covered asymmetrically. They help to distinguish between two distinct pictorial layers and lead to unavoidable friction between them. The change of rhythm between isolation and integration generates a sense of movement in the picture, just as it seeks a shift from two to three dimensionality and then retreats again.
The holy figures on the arms of the Crucifix free themselves to tell a story: the predella is born, often in the form of a narrative in a number of stages. Chinese manuals on woodcutting, with their mustard-seed garden and ten-bamboo hall , are folded in the middle. Lacquered landscapes on folding screens are set out in three or four parts. Abel Gance divides the cinema screen into three sections on which separate images can be projected.
Michael Lukas sets out many of his pictures as diptychs or triptychs. Forms consisting of many parts come to assert themselves. Through the relationship between the wings, the picture assumes a compact size. Its unity lies solely in the argument between the parts; unresolved and unappeased, relativized in itself, it is articulated into diachronic processes.
In the early Renaissance, architectural frames, partial frames and niches were painted around altarpieces. The Pre-Raphaelites and Symbolists extended their depictive spaces to the very frames.
Michael Lukas places segments of frames, strips painted on or glued on, to the edges of pictures. He refers to the problems of confining images, to uncertainties in the boundaries between the inner space of a work and the world outside it, and to opening the picture to unformed elements. At the same time, he resists putting his work in that decorative category in which one differentiates precious objects for observation from other things.
As a result of all these factors, a form emerges that corresponds with the history of the artistic production, that allows the articulation of its problems through one's own work and the extrapolation of potential solutions. In earlier times perhaps, people did not pay so much attention to the nervous movement that occurs at the boundary between overlaid areas and exposed portions of a picture; to the segmentation and disruption of the narrative caused by joints and seams; to the extension of an image and its conflict with the format and frame; and to the residual experience of the form in which pictures present themselves. Nowadays, seemingly incidental things of this kind emerge in isolation from history; they are enlarged and made to speak in the debate about what a picture is, a debate that is sparked off by every new, original work. To some people, new painting may seem to exist in a hermetically sealed state; but on the contrary, structural elements of this kind speak of things that are readily accessible and familiar: certain things were always in this form, have always been part of the history of seeing, of the re-establishment of what is seen and has been seen, as well as of things that never had anything to do with seeing.
In the four aspects mentioned above, problems manifest themselves that are related to the materialization of experiences, of precise perceptions, of evident memories or of self-reflections of perceptions that lie outside the actual picture. In Lukas's pictures, problems of this kind undergo an insistent, continuous treatment: namely, things that can be experienced, layering and depth, the organization of the surface, and the fragment. Via each of these four complexes, it seems to me, one has access to and may come to understand the work of Michael Lukas in terms of the formal decisions that are taken. Painting is probably not so much a bid to capture something, but more the attempt to assign this something to the work itself; the ascertainment of stimuli that can be reflected in the eye and that – with a bold, unhesitating approach in one's work – will prove to be unique. That, indeed, is the emphatic meaning of the term "the original". The appearance of this first, still unpainted picture recedes in the working process; it disappears, but may reappear again either in bold, precisely delineated, animated expressions or equally in vague, probing or even stereotyped ones. It is a process Lukas knows so well that he repeatedly allows it to enter the act of composition – as a reference to the "event" that the picture represents, to its first appearance and its autonomy, and even to the threat posed to the picture by every earlier and categorically unpaintable picture. Opening the "book" conveys just such a reference: it is formulated in the camouflage-like design of the rear faces of the sheets and in the hints of unpainted images, of a masking of the idea, of disturbances and incomplete realizations of the concept, all of which are contained in the overlaid areas of the picture. In forms like this, Lukas shows an awareness of pictures that exist independently of the observer's awareness of them, but that can find expression only through images.
The observer is, therefore, confronted with works that never allow him to forget the act or event of their inception; more than that: works that reclaim this event through the process of their composition to create a picture in its own right. Processes that cannot be brought to an end, momentary fluctuations, movements caused by tension and release, as well as tokens of decay – all these things one can probably see and comprehend in Lukas's index of time. More importantly, however, they should be understood as references to those other phenomena that are represented only incompletely in the picture – realizations of something unrepeatable, which place the picture in a permanent state of opposition to itself, since they are both the things that motivate the picture as well as those things that are absent, removed, fragmentarily appearing: its dissolution and fortune.
This means that the work always lands at a certain distance from the impulses that gave rise to it; equally, however, it means that the character of the event has such a powerful impact on the picture that it is only seemingly incomplete, simply dissected by different sequences of events and scales of time, and that it can be completed only in an incomplete form – together with all the other paradoxes.
These conflicting rhythms and contrasting measures of time within the picture are not "resolved"; indeed, even in the impossibility of their resolution, they are comprehensible only to someone whom the picture has successfully persuaded to comprehend the production process largely through its appearance – to such an extent that one comes to recognize that the observer is, in fact, painted by the picture. He or she must not only submit to its processes, its sudden, fragmentary ideas and sporadic moments of success; the observer is actually moulded in the course of all this – something that can be accomplished only in processual work. In other words: necessary lines, not "artistically" motivated ones; the animated application of paint, not painting as such; sand, scraps of paper, hair in the paint, not precious things, nothing "valuable"; indications of tempo and phrasing that determine the way of reading, no mantras, no endless configurations; and equally, no profanation of painting, no repetition of the same destructive movement – always in the same direction – against the medium and its history. What then?
Michael Lukas avoids the most obvious argument for his aesthetic understanding: he does not plan his work as a commentary on painting, but bases it more on sensations that could lie just as much beyond the bounds of painting itself as outside the visual faculty. When two people see each other again after a long interval and suddenly notice only the light that lies between them; when at some point one no longer understands the meaning of a word, but only the sound it represents; when one no longer finds an analogy in a spontaneous association, but only an environment or a certain atmosphere, one will perhaps briefly sense the shock that comes when the visual realm and a tangible order disintegrate into nothing but shifting meanings, motifs and stimuli.
At such moments, the experience of informal painting is also activated, the sense of having to abandon understanding, assent, discursive corroboration of a different form of correspondence: in other words, the recognition of stimuli that perhaps cannot even be communications in the conventional sense of the term, yet which possess the indubitable quality of pure evidence. Pictures that paint in this way possess something of the self-evidence of natural things; their objective state lies beyond conceptual comprehension, yet they correspond with the observer; they transmit themselves through an excitation of direct congruity. But a congruity with what? The observer knows the answer vaguely. The picture knows it precisely, but merely as a paradox. It contains evidence of sensations that can be proved only through pictures.
Michael Lukas 's works are distinguished by this form of aesthetic self-assertion. Functioning at the periphery of objectifiable stimuli, they exhibit a state of reason devoid of illusionism and outcry; which is why they seem to owe their origin to experiences in which painting exists independently of the act of seeing: as a reply to the question about the material quality of things and colours; as a record of empathy; as an argument against the figurative nature of a picture as a three-dimensional, material entity; and finally, in accordance with Berkeley's " esse est percipii ", as an attempt at self-perception on the part of the painter and of the picture. In this respect, these pictures are also predictions of probability; they are conjectures, research into the place where a picture gains its cogency. The working process is the act of understanding; but the work itself is not a document of "having understood".
Just as one can comprehend these pictures through the rhythm of their materialization, their composition and fragmentation, so one should also understand them in terms of their distance. Since the productive process never comes to an end, their centre of stimulation must remain concealed. Similarly, the distance from the object can be defined more closely, but never finally determined. In each of these pictures of late, the distance from defined objects is described. Processes of this kind are so closely entwined with the genesis of the picture that, for the most part, they come to the surface only in a hermetic form. Perhaps one may see this dialectic reflected in the gesture with which some of the pictures more or less dictate the distance the observer should maintain from the canvas – a reference to the fact that works of such commitment as Lukas extracts from the medium are delivered at varying distances from the painter himself; and he cannot always seek to bring the entire canvas to the same pitch as the area of central focus.
The fact that Michael Lukas 's pictures derive their intuitive qualities through the dialogue of their own genesis also determines their organization. Diptychs and triptychs, pairs of pictures that correspond and are yet opposed to each other, overlapping and juxtaposed montage areas, collages, enlargements, cut-out window-like views, uncovered segments where deeper pictorial layers are exposed, planar, faded zones like pale areas of the skin that are revealed when a plaster is removed, drawings that peter out over an area of land, captured as in maps that record false paths, flying forms, swelling, joined, striding, tilted, made-up molluscs, extinguished material, and weakly pigmented epithelium, bulging and receding areas of the picture, silhouettes, site plans, construction drawings, paper patterns, architectural elevations of organs, cellular forms, emblems, scraps of writing, flags, pictures within pictures: all these elements serve to describe the inexorable expansion of simultaneous pictorial spaces in which signs drift and become relativized, in which they shrink and reveal the singular meaning of their gesticulations through an act of pure alienation. Perhaps these forms have taken the place of the writing that was present – overpainted and erased – in earlier works by Michael Lukas : writing as a genuine expression of diversity, yet also as a homogeneous medium of moribund signals; writing as a representation of the pure syntax that stands for a compact form of signification and conception, and against which painting asserts itself here with undeniable appeals to the asyntactic element both within human perception and outside it. In these early pictures, the material quality of the paint devours the writing as a residual token of imageless representation. In its place, it sets a secret language, a wealth of signs that consist of an endless range of relationships and that afford a new, non-apodictic but also non-hypothetical understanding of surfaces, colours, lines, textures, spaces, incidences of light and indications of tempo.
In this visual work, coexistence and simultaneity have a greater significance. On the wings of the polyptych, a principle of association and demarcation of pictorial elements manifests itself. This is continued in the interior space, so that the picture becomes an interrogation of itself. The observer becomes the object of the picture by virtue of the fact that he follows the uncertain arrangement of its various sections and their relationship to each other, all of which is subject to many revisions; and by selecting pictures within the picture, the observer makes a decision on the basis of a comparison of different visual possibilities. In all this, he succeeds neither in fixing the surfaces and their reciprocal relationships, nor in tearing individual pictorial elements from their flow and apprehending them. In that respect, the perception fixes the picture immediately prior to its completion and exhaustion in a state of perfection and consolidation that is merely suggested schematically. Experiencing precisely these things through the picture, however, means comprehending its essential nature, its chronos .
In this act of recognition, the strong state of discord of the work is finally grasped. All its internal boundaries now reveal themselves to be reflections of that central conflict which is expressed in the format of the picture, in its lines of demarcation from unpainted pictures in the space outside it, and in the intermittent continuation and extension of this one picture. Can a picture not lie completely, or at least in large part, outside its own boundaries? Does the epic of excitations not tend towards thinking without a frame and without admitting to one? The multiplication of images in a single picture, a double and a multiple exposure of the canvas, the integration of the fragment – these are simply techniques that help to demonstrate that time in a picture is endless and that the determination of the space indicates a vestige of control and order which refutes any notion of inferiority on the part of the painter towards his picture.
This process is painstakingly thought out in the work of Michael Lukas , which is as if packed with seams, boundary marks, sketched fault lines and partially integrated hints of framing. Therein it finds its own plausible language to express the painful process of non-extension of the picture and at the same time to articulate the boundlessness of the visual space. At this juncture, the contours offset each other; bursts of energy are absorbed unbuffered; the objects lose their definition; the compression becomes unbearable; and the picture grows quite unlike itself. It oozes out and expands at the dividing line between overlayed and covered areas, from the seam of the picture to the frame; and along this endless contour line, it develops into a satellite photo of the largest continent: of the unseen, what is averted from the eye. At that point, it is impossible to confine the picture; senseless to describe it now; paradoxical to frame a fragment.
Roger Willemsen, 1991
[Translation: Peter Green]