PRESENTATION: Jonathan Lasker-Painting and Drawing
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: Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery Archive
In “Painting and Drawing” Jonathan Lasker presents a series of rarely exhibited pencil and ink drawings. Created autonomously from his painting practice, these works on paper reflect Lasker’s characteristic visual vocabulary of geometric gestures and patterns in a delicate and immediate way. Presented alongside this group of drawings are four recent paintings, the very first works to come out of the artist’s newly established studio in Munich. A significant change from the energy and noise of New York City, this unfamiliar environment facilitated an experimental atmosphere for the artist and served as a unique source of inspiration for him at this time. The dialogue established between the two distinct series of paintings and drawings opens up a new perspective within this exhibition, highlighting the breadth of the American artist’s work. Lasker’s unmistakable painterly language is based on a distinctive mark-making process, initially conceived during his studies at the California Institute of the Arts in the late 1970s, where prevailing conceptual tendencies declared painting dead. His focus lies on an intuitive approach to artmaking, evident in the works on view through the palpable sense of dynamism and playfulness that they achieve, despite resulting from a carefully controlled process. His motifs include hovering, cloud-like circular fields of scribbles, structural grids, and graphic lines juxtaposed with colorful, relief-like impasto forms created through the vigorous application of paint. Like interlocking pieces of a puzzle, these elements form the core of his conceptual framework. For his paintings and also this new series of drawings, exhibited for the first time, Lasker’s creative process commences with sketches, intuitively capturing basic shapes as raw inspiration on paper. “I do a lot of sketching in my spiral-bound sketchbooks, and that is usually where the works start”, he explains. These initial outlines, often realised freehand in a stream of consciousness, serve as the foundation for his thought-out compositions. “The making of a picture, to me, is not necessarily improvisational. The origins of what it’s going to be get imagined and improvised, but the act of making the paintings tends to be more strategic. They are preconceived and no mistakes are allowed”. The paintings and drawings materialise this synthesis of spontaneity and intentionality. Evoking perceptions of surface and depth, Lasker’s works convey a sense of figurative presence despite the viewer’s inability to truly identify the pictorial content. At first sight, the backgrounds are surface bound, but on closer inspection the compositions feature indications of linear perspective, hinting at conceptions of space such as horizon lines. ‘Even though my works are abstract, I still consider them to be pictures, and they inspire recognition,’ the artist explains. Rejecting the idea of a passive artwork-viewer relationship, the often colourful, diagrammatic compositions oscillate between intuition and analysis, encouraging viewers to connect the disparate elements that constitute the work to find their own associative sense of meaning and narrative. As Lasker explains, “I always think of the viewer as completing the picture”.
Photo: Jonathan Lasker, Picture With Alpine Quadrant, 2022, Oil on linen, 76 x 102 cm (30 x 40 in), © Jonathan Lasker, Courtesy the artist and Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery
Info: Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, Salzburg Villa Kast, Mirabellplatz 2, Salzburg, Austria, Duration: 27/1-1/3/2024, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://ropac.net/
