LUCAS POSADA G., BETWEEN HIS LIFE AND MYTH.

 

The more time goes on and the more we think we know, the less certain we are on our thought on art, science and technology It would seem as if knowledge leads to disconcert rather than to clarity and a sense of orientation. Gone is the ideal of the modern project which sought to conquer the world by means of technology; this dark place called post-modernism makes the failure of that project obvious. Just to name the most self evident of examples, technology seems to head towards the destruction, if not of  all life on the entire planet, at least of most of the biodiversity and, of course, of the very species that created it. The idea, however, was that technology should aim at creating well-being and balance, not impoverishment and chaos.
We are forced to identify the breakdown that would explain the incongruence between the project and its execution. Could it be that man’s mission is as a regressive agent that leads relentlessly to death and conflict with other fellow creatures ? Some of us think so, others, like Lucas the painter, refuse with all their might to believe it despite all evidence.
It’s as if Lucas engages us through his paintings to search in man’s forgotten past for the origin of that incongruence, of that rupture with nature, and retrieve sense through myth which is the mark of that memory.
For Lucas, man is one with nature, he shares the belief that the flutter of a butterfly wing in Australia affects life in our never placid Bogotá. He is one of those people who possess some divine quality, who share something with the Creator, as if he were part of a whole and that whole had some order.
That is how we view this painter and see his paintings. They have parts and they are a whole. But the parts have no specific place in the totality because they belong to a greater whole which in turn is part of a greater whole still, in a sort of ascending progression aiming to see the oneness in the multiple without detriment to the multiplicity. It is not our intention to delve into academic tongue twisters above our heads, but that is the direction Lucas’ paintings point in, towards a labyrinth that is at once the whole and its parts.
He looks for what is primeval to the species, sinking in the quicksand of man’s myths and their signs, he drinks them in and makes them his very life’s blood as he paints and becomes part of that order he believes in.
This exhibition will show crude, direct images that threaten to offend too tender a sensitivity. When on the subject of the androgynous character for example, or at least that issue worries its author; but that risk disappears because of the poetics of his work, because the painting itself is assertive to the point it legitimizes his license, dissolving any obscene impact.
Lucas often encircles very strong color with deep black, brutally disrupting  the original black emptiness with his colored impastos. It is the enigmatic and quiet darkness that perturbs us with its apparently anarchic colors, and be²hind which one eventually discovers the underlying order. So, it’s not at ran²dom that one once again relates his manner of painting to the myths of the origins.
Therein lies the coherence and self-assurance of his work. His paintings resemble him; that is the only valid criteria we have for judging a work of art (although we are less sure every day that judgment there should be), that it is true to itself and true to its author. In this case, the author and his work correspond to each other, and that is the greatest strength underlying both. Although our intuition tells us this is probably not what the painter believes because, in order to be true to himself, he would tend to think that strength rests on his harmony with the cosmos.

María Clara Martínez Rivera
coincidentia oppositorum  or the mystery of oneness: Androgynia
Bogotá, July, 1996