ART CITIES: Paris-Jonathan Lasker

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.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Thaddaeus Gallery Archive

Jonathan Lasker in his solo exhibition “Painting and Drawing” presents a dialogue between a group of his pencil and ink drawings spanning over a decade, and the first body of paintings to emerge from his newly established studio in Munich. This significant change from the energy and noise of New York City opened up an atmosphere of experimentation for the artist, which is discernible in the new paintings. His rarely exhibited works on paper, meanwhile, with their material lightness and crisp lines, harness the immediacy and suppleness of drawing to reveal another side of the American artist’s practice. The artist’s language is based on a distinctive mark-making process. Among the motifs that characterise his oil paintings are hovering, cloud-like fields of scribbles, structural grids, and graphic lines juxtaposed with colorful, relief-like impasto forms created through the intensely physical act of ploughing a thick layer of paint across the canvas. These elements constitute the vocabulary of the artist’s imaginary visual landscape, which he transposes onto the picture plane like the interlocking pieces of a puzzle. Bringing together his paintings with his drawings, the exhibition testifies to how Lasker’s distinctive formal vocabulary is inflected across different mediums, opening up new angles from which to see his work. For both his paintings and his drawings, Lasker’s creative process commences with sketches, in which he captures rudimentary shapes in their intuitive, raw form 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 on view in the exhibition manifest this synthesis of spontaneity and intentionality. Lasker’s works convey a sense of figurative presence while foiling the viewer’s attempts at a direct narrative interpretation. At first sight, the backgrounds seem bound up within the surfaces of the works, but on closer inspection the compositions feature indications of linear perspective and even horizon lines, hinting at conceptions of real-world volumes in an invitation to the viewer to interrogate the way they distinguish sense and space in a work of art. ‘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 inducing intuition and analysis, encouraging viewers to find their own associative sense of meaning and narrative within the enigma where these disparate approaches to interpretation meet.

Photo: Jonathan Lasker, Untitled, 2023, Graphite and colored pencil on paper Image 57,2 x 76,5 cm (22,52 x 30,12 in) Frame 65,3 x 84,7 x 3,5 cm (25,71 x 33,35 x 1,38 in), © Jonathan Lasker, Photo: Ulrich Ghezzi, Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, London · Paris · Salzburg · Seoul

Info: Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, 7 Rue Debelleyme, Paris, France, Duration: 12/4-18/5/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-19:00, https://ropac.net/