PRESENTATION: Jonathan Lasker-New Paintings

Since the late 1970s, Jonathan Lasker has developed a distinctive formal vocabulary based on different mark-making processes, including structural grids, graphic scribbled lines and thick impasto strokes of paint. Although he creates these forms intuitively, the compositions themselves are highly structured and controlled. At the forefront of artists who re-established the possibilities of painting after Minimalism and Conceptualism emptied the picture-plane, he has mounted a challenge to the medium’s status quo, creating a unique system of painting based on a figure-ground relationship, in which the figure and ground stand in a dialectical relationship to one another.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Archive

Jonathan Lasker uses doubled, transposed and translated forms to create paintings composed of distinct, clearly defined elements. Each image in the picture becomes a thing itself, an element to be examined, experienced and categorised; a component of the larger grammatical structure that Lasker has built. The pictures which form are arrived at by the viewer interpretively rather than literally, through an active engagement with the different abstract figures on the canvas and the relationships between them. Viewers are encouraged to experience themselves through the act of viewing and, in the end, they become the subject of Lasker’s paintings. Jonathan Lasker presets his solo exhibition “New Paintings”. Throughout his career, Lasker has developed a distinctive formal vocabulary based on different mark-making processes in response to the prevailing minimalist and conceptual art movements. Together, the group of paintings on view showcases the artist’s new, playful approach to his idiosyncratic visual language. Lasker is a considered, deliberate painter, who uncouples line and colour in his works, inviting us to think through the construction of images and narratives out of paint. In his new paintings, he juxtaposes his signature scribbles and sober black outlines with thickly-rendered, sherbet-colored shapes that appear to converse and interact on the canvas. Set against a white background, in contrast to previous paintings on colored grounds, these organic, fluid forms are poised on the edge of representation, opening up new visual dimensions for viewers to explore. Encased in a cartridge of red scribbles, the artist’s signature in “For Jonathan” (2019) exemplifies the humour with which Lasker has infused his visual vocabulary in recent years. This new compositional element is an extension of the line as one of the foundations of painting, which the artist has explored throughout his career in the form of structural grids and graphic scribbles. Like a thread pulled out of the surrounding tangle, it playfully highlights the social and artistic implications that are attributed to a line when it takes a shape we recognise as someone’s name. As Lasker explains, “In traditional painting, a brushstroke is the means to an end, but in [my work], a brushstroke is a thing unto itself”. Key to accessing Lasker’s works is his process, which begins in the form of sketches realised freehand like a stream of consciousness. On the canvas, by contrast, the garbled lines seem all but erratic. Transposed first onto a study, they are then enlarged and carefully traced with a paintbrush and thinned black or red paint. The result is a series of unbroken circuits that hover between conscious and unconscious, the mechanical and the hand-made. At once laboured and spontaneous, these forms reveal the different temporalities within which Lasker’s works operate. The colorful impasto forms, by contrast, are created by pushing and ploughing paint across the canvas. Making them is an intense, physical act that is belied by their whimsical appearance. In a similar way, the black furrows that sinew through some of the colored shapes in “Esoteric Construction” (2020) and “Equitable Landscape” (2021) require careful attention and some degree of force. Realised before the underlying form has time to dry, they echo the artist’s signature, physically anchoring the act of making into the paint itself. As Lasker says: ‘There’s something existential about it,’ adding, ‘there’s a lot at stake in each element of the painting, because if the execution fails then the painting fails.’ Lasker’s paintings are defined by paradox and engineered through a friction between opposing concepts and visual elements. ‘I use random, unconscious marks to consciously compose the constituent shapes within the picture,’ he explains, ‘in other words, I seek to confront the unbounded subconscious with the containment of bounded forms.’ At once thick and flat, conceptual and intensely physical, his works highlight the poles of creativity that underpin the making and consumption of images: abstraction and figuration, order and disorder, mathematics and metaphor.

Photo: Jonathan Lasker, The Spirit Within, 2020, Oil on linen, 12 x 16 inches (30 x 41 cm), © Jonathan Lakser, Courtesy the artist and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac

Info: Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, 7 Rue Debelleyme, Paris, France, Duration: 21/6-30/7/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-19:00, https://ropac.net/