The painting of Ignacio De Lucca is inserted in the current revisionism of the models of modernity, with a contemporary vision that breaks the normative manner of those poetics. For a long time his work referred to his native Misiones and, more specifically, to the exuberance of that landscape. In the exhibition that he presents today, he begins a new stage. There is a change in the internal process of realization, with slower action. The referential motifs are outlined barely suggested in a spatial dimension exempt from the narrative character that prevailed in his previous works. It is a conceptual turn that resumes an abstraction process begun in 2004 when he participated in the ¨Paintings Edge Program¨ residency for artists, California. There, with the gaze and dialogue with the teachers Elizabeth Murray, Terry Winters and Laura Owens, he begins to experiment with procedures and processes (gesture, stain) that now return as tools to create images.
I was a witness to that journey. In the months that I was accompanying Ignacio in the creation of this exhibition, I always felt that entering his workshop has something of a ritual. A slower way of acting, allowing the imprint of the stain to generate a spontaneous image. The delay is planned, like the Japanese archer who when executing a shot is not just about hitting the target; the sword is not brandished to defeat the adversary; The dancer does not dance solely in order to execute rhythmic movements. Above all, it is about harmonizing the conscious with the unconscious (according to Eugen Herrigel, in Zen in the art of target shooting; Gaia publishing house, Madrid, 2012).
In the performative action that precedes the act of painting there is a strategy of waiting that requires a regulation of energy. Lucca and his canvases are transmuted into a single reality, in the same way that the imaginary archer we are talking about also becomes the bow. He places the canvases on the ground on paint cans of different heights and sets up an invented terrain with wells, unevenness and another series of intentionally caused accidents. Then the dripping on the fabric begins and chance acquires its own rhythm. At that moment the artist is already inserted in a private ceremony where the stain directs the course and the alchemy of the encounter takes place. This is when the image appearsIn this series there is a regulation of energy and times different. The first gesture is almost an acrobatics, a jump without a net. governs the chance more than my own will, – Ignacio confesses to me. “There is a maxim concentration at the initial moment, then comes a slower process of adjustments and accents, where time and a distanced gaze end up defining the works.”
The staging of each session requires very precise physical concentration to generate the dynamic between chance and control. As he comments, “It is a process that makes me dizzy, because I have a personality that takes me to excess and now I dose the energy in short periods of time”. In the construction of the image there is still a story, but reduced to a minimum, stripping the narrative and chromatic tone in monochrome works. There is an almost architectural structure armed with the corporeality of white oil paint, which works in thick superimposed layers, creating a counterpoint between different surfaces. The painting expands in the space of the room with an installation site specific of a mural made of enameled ceramic, along with volumetric sculptures that refer to a final nature scene. Clues of a remembered place that are the original habitat of the artist eroded by the passage of time. As in a score, he measures the tone of his music in which he alternates the soft tone of the diluted, almost velvety paint, with the gravity of the thick matter.
The exterior landscape, so evident in previous works, is today a scene of its own subjectivity. His flowers and plants acquire abstract forms that move away from the represented world and approach their own symbolic model. That model that Ignacio inhabits is nature as a place where the poetic happens. A territory designed with the exact balance between sensitivity and concept where the aesthetic experience happens.
* Graduate in Art History; curator of the exhibition. Text written especially for the exhibition. In the Tramo gallery, Avenida Alvear 1580, ground floor, until the end of May.
