exhibitied Works
The pictures of Timur Lukas tell their own stories, effortlessly and devoid of pathos. You can see people at social gatherings or in moments when they are lost in themselves. The protagonists walk along a beach at dusk, secretly smoke their last cigarettes in a forest clearing or gaze into the distance, lost in thought. Their boxy trench coats, beige suits and floral dress give the impression that they have fallen out of time. There are familiar scenes that, somehow, we know about. We can compare, recognise, connect the dots. While Lukas dealt with subjective childhood memories in his earlier “vase pictures,” the works in his new series are based on old amateur photographs and yellowed postcards that used to belong to people he did not know. Perhaps in those days the photographs were kept like treasures, framed and hung on the wall, or presented at evening slide shows. It is hard to imagine that nowadays when scrolling through the gigantic mass of photos on your mobile. Who were these people? And who captured them on camera? We don’t
know them, neither do we know their stories. To Timur Lukas, the photographs and postcards are historical documents which manifest realities of earlier life, social norms as well as past ideals. In his colorfull, scenic and painterly transformation, the strange snapshots become universal spaces of memory, of remembrance. Photographically frozen moments are broken up into kaleidoscopic painting fields that flow out in every direction and merge with the subjective perception of their viewers, multiplying in their gaze. For the first time, Lukas has not worked on canvas, but on wooden panels. Every single brushstroke on their surface becomes an artistic statement. The nature of the wood allows him to make free and sometimes unpredictable gestures, but whose arrangement nevertheless remains precise and exact. In an impressionistic manner, points are formed into traces of storms, weather-beaten house walls or reflections on water surfaces. The colour palette is richly varied, occasionally garish and oscillating. That does not mean a naturalistic imitation to Lukas, but the intention to capture the atmosphere, the fleeting, the ephemeral. Sometimes it all seems downright psychedelic, for example in the works “Red Night” or “Poet in a Yellow Room”. Coloured light reflections reinforce the illusionistic atmosphere. The pictorial scenarios build up fragmentarily into landscapes and interiors. Thin, fluid colour gradients blend into trees, branches and fences. They sometimes block our view or frame the scene like windows behind which dreamlike landscapes open up before us. Lukas applies impasto to make the figures who move through these surroundings become shadowy shapes with anonymous facial features. Aesthetic analogies to photography sometimes echo in their linear posi-
tioning and their erect postures. This is particularly noticeable in the work “Natalie Lässig” [Nonchalant Natalie], in which a young woman with black hair and a green and red dress can be seen sitting on a chair. We see her body facing us frontally, while her left arm rests easily on the back of the chair. Both her gestures and her direct, almost challenging look tell us that the moment was staged photographically.
In the painterly appropriation of Lukas, too, she seems to react to the gaze of her viewers. In the works of Lukas, alien and subjective memories blur into fictitious contemporary interpretations. His painting implies transience and shows us how it might have been at one time – or how it should have been. His work describes it to us, sometimes dazzling and enigmatic, sometimes quiet and oblivious to the world.
