Emil Lukas: Ringing of Distant Events

In Ringing of Distant Events, Emil Lukas presents four disparate types of work whose unconventional media and quirky techniques are completely dissimilar. Yet they are unified by an experimental approach driven by an insatiable curiosity about the behavior of materials, both living and inanimate. Lukas’ most eccentric process in the exhibition uses living fly larvae to drag ink across a surface. Small works testify to the power of an individual calligraphic line. Large works made from the paths of tens of thousands evoke vascular systems, clouds of interstellar gasses, or interlaced tree branches as though viewed from below. Chunky cast-plaster works are composed of a honeycomb of multitudes of cells, individually stained through an accrual of water-soluble pigments that get blotted out, are allowed to soak in, or evaporate to leave their crusty evidence. Seen head-on, the multi-colored pixels create shimmering fields – a kind of nonobjective pointillism. Viewed from the edge, they have the sculptural quality of soft stone, pitted and polished by water. Lukas’ “puddle” works are history paintings, not in the sense of human narrative, but of geological time. Painted flat, he floods canvases with layer after layer of liquid. Sediments pool and collect, then dry leaving their traces. Subsequent layers obliterate, expose and affect what came before. Lukas may be best known for his “thread paintings” – shallow wooden trays over which he criss-crosses thread to create complex, glowing color fields. Each an experiment in color theory, they’re optical, phenomenological and astonishing. For those who’ve watched Lukas’ development in the 20-odd years that he’s been exhibiting in the Bay Area, the roots of these works will be familiar, though the pieces themselves will be surprising. Labor-intensive and experimental, reliant on natural processes and his investigation of eccentric materials, each work and each type of work informs the other, like an ecosystem of action and reaction. Emil Lukas was born in Pittsburgh, PA in 1964 and now lives in Stockertown, PA. He has exhibited extensively internationally and has been collected by, among others, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Henry Art Gallery (University of Washington, Seattle), and the prestigious Panza di Biumo Collection. This is his fifth solo exhibition at Hosfelt Gallery.