No. 10 / August 2019
Mihai Plămădeală, art critic – article published on Observator Cultural magazine, no.410/ 14th of February, 2008
The theme of machine-men, developed by Iulia Lucan over three years, started from a series of initial drawings that vaguely suggested the relationship between the human body and various invented objects. The inner law of composition of the visual forms was the hazard. Over time, the initial drawings and sketches were gradually replaced by artworks made in oil on canvas, and the motifs began to touch the area of the collective sub consciousness, taking archetypal structures.
An issue becoming essential proved to be avoiding the illustrative and the anecdotic, that would compromise the base idea. In opposition, the monumental and the emblematic could sabotage what the artist wished to show. Otherwise, the duality between metaphysics and and livresque is present in her work. The amusement given by man’s dependence on machinery also includes a tragic component. The mechanism is personalized and at the same time fully mastered, as a component part of the being.
The artist confesses that she wanted to illustrate the reversal of biological and mechanical functions. “I start from a system of relationships established between man and the mechanical component, whether it is a machine(ery) or a mechanism of operation. Suggesting the reversibility of actions or recontextualizing them induces anxiety, an idea accentuated by the fusion of mineral and biological textures. The mechanization of life is a trap of civilization, from which one can escape, in my paintings, through the intervention of the playful. The functioning mechanisms of nature, developed through the free play of fantasy, abolish the boundary between the real and the imaginary. Everything becomes possible, respectively nothing is definitive in a world whose logic and coherence exclude the amorphous.
Inventing signs is part of my visual system. It is about reinterpreting the known things, starting from banalities and reaching the abstract. The texts included in the field of my artworks have become a constant. The joining of Cyrillic, Latin, Arabic signs, in existing or non-existing words, sends to the world I see or at least which I transpose into my canvases. The text has a pseudo-explanatory role, remaining on a secondary level in compositions. My next personal exhibition, from March 2008, at Atelier 35, Bucharest, will be called La Mahina Telurica, a title covering these ideas.”
The similarities with Peter Greenaway’s visual work stop in this case at a formal level. Iulia Lucan’s “texts” are applied on floating surfaces, without rhythmically intervening in the image itself. The chromatics of the letters are also neutral. In her compositions, regardless of the tones used, there is a relationship with a violent, saturated or black color. The intervention of an outside element leads the artwork to the same area of obsessions left intentionally unresolved. Mixed touches and hatches create an attenuated visual agitation of flat shades that energize the surface. The overlapping of tones aims at spinning the contours and passing into the penumbra.
In the artist’s vision, all human actions represent variations on the same theme or possibly distortions. Another exhibition project is entitled “Un-Comfort”. The idea of machine-men is transposed in this case in another relationship: the one between man and pet. The series of works is based on relativization. The comfort suggested through and by man’s “companionship” with the animal is cancelled by placing “genre” scenes in a hostile, violent world in which something exceptional is about to happen. The same violent tones, the same exaggerated perspective and visual agitation decontextualize the domestic peace, transposing the theme into a multivalent, undefined, but still figurative background.
Among the artist’s previous themes, we mention the “rural period” in which the main role belonged to a world about to disappear. Placing her grandparents in this personal imaginary space has Chagallian accents. The three-dimensional suggestions through surface shields and Emile Nolde’s expressionist insert speak of a visual system that is both personal and archetypal.
Finally, the theme of the tree, another family of themes approached by Iulia Lucan, involves the personalization of the vegetable kingdom through various textures and on the border between the trunk and the root. The junction between the worlds, seen through Jung’s vision, is “attacked” carnal and epidermal, in a way close to the work of Alexandru Rădvan. In this case also, the post-Dada accents send the artist on her personal route, via Victor Brauner.
If we are dealing with a Dada vision, the connections are surreal. Illusionism, the Op-Art component or magical realism are excluded. The iconographic sources are, as the artist tells us, newspaper or technical photographs, literature – especially poetry (Guillaume Apollinaire, Saint-John Perse) or Chaplin’s movies.
Among the artist’s projects, “The Manuscript” is strongly distinguished, a laboratory-collection of images, texts, comments, original poems. This artwork, with the appearance of a Leonardo manuscript, includes notations, fanciful calculations, numbers, invented geometries … in another key of interpretation, the work of a lifetime, visually reproduced through a process of automatic dictation. This is Iulia Lucan’s vision of Machine-Men, an obsessive theme, but not obsessive in her creation.