SPECIAL FEATURE: Martin Lukáč

Martin Lukáč in his creation often varies simple and contrastive forms and visual motifs represented in numerous series. The cycle of forty black and white charcoal drawings defines author’s obsessive interest in infinite possibilities of lines and levels and the need to at least imply all the thinkable alternatives offered by these basic means of expression. Compositions give the impression of automatic drawings, spontaneous graphic records simulating naive and uninitiated creative expression. Drawings perform as fictitious alphabet or graphic score, as mimicry of symbols representing only themselves and if they refer to something, it is to variations of constantly appropriated and ideologically emptied forms of historical conceptual expression. Richness of their forms affects the expositor mostly at associative level and besides reminding of formal language of gestic abstraction or font written by hand, areas of black and white compositions look as projection levels for the recipient, similarly to the Rorschach test. They call for spectator’s empathy and imagination. The semantics of this „alphabet“ is thus open for interpretation and it is formed in each viewer at individual level. Some sheets of the series look unaesthetically and subversively: we cannot find there gracefulness and elegance of the calligraphy lines nor harmonic proportionality of the typography. Are they testing of limits: where point changes into line and line into level? Where shapelesness changes into forms? Where is the limit between scratch and „correct“ refined drawing line? Where is the limit between harmonious and disharmonious composition? Drawing performs as the signature, as essential record of the creative gesture, resulting in vividness of expression of elementary forms and basic contrasts. Drawings of Lukáč are a pure facticity, they are not substitutive symbols of something else: they point out their essence and materiality also with traces of crumbled powder pigment that transcend single lines of author’s lines on the paper base and they physically present protection against reducing perception of these graphics.

-Peter Megyeši

Martin Lukáč, untitled, 2017, Charcoal on paper 25,0 × 35,3 cm