Lucas Dupuy at Tick Tack

Artist: Lucas Dupuy

Exhibition title: Formless Anxiety

Venue: Tick Tack, Antwerp, Belgium

Date: April 8 – 29, 2023

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Tick Tack, Antwerp

TICK TACK is excited to showcase the very first solo show of Lucas Dupuy in Belgium, accompanied by the launch of his latest publication ‘Formless Anxiety’. The exhibition highlights Dupuy’s unseen paintings, a new series of engraved and printed reliefs, as well as sculptures completed with a complementary audio artwork. ‘Formless Anxiety’ explores brutalist architecture, technological advancement, popular culture and language systems with the artists inherent subtle sentimentality and energetic anxiety.

The tome itself, produced by the artist’s own publishing house Lichen Books (run in collaboration with All Purpose Studio), comprises half a decade’s worth of artistic expression and investigation. An essay by writer and curator Charlie Mill introduces the publication, drawing a lot of comparisons between surrealism, hauntology, nostalgia, electronic music and video games (Metal Gear Solid 2, Half-Life 2, Deus Ex). The book’s exceptional design, printing, matte and rough old-school paper make it an ASMR experience for the reader.

Lucas Dupuy’s work is boundary-pushing, converging different disciplines and lines of inquiry within a holistic voice. His art offers a space for contemplation and calmness, highlighting often overlooked beauty in our world. This is seen across his painting, sculpture, photography and publishing, but also in the variations of process and consumption that are their result.

Dupuy’s artworks are experimental and intuitive, often combining his paintings, drawings, and photographs with the use of a xerographic copying machine. This results in printed collages that abstract each element from their original intention, adding a layer of complexity to the pieces.

The exhibition’s sound piece is a 20-minute collage of experimental ambient, samples from video games and sounds recorded in Japan, Cornwall and London. The perfect angle to experience this sound piece is provided by the concave construction of sculpture, referencing Sound Mirrors, brutalist monoliths and the now-obsolete acoustic mirrors, scattered along the South and North East coasts of England.

In addition, the exhibition offers a supporting cinema program curated by Dupuy, featuring moving-image artworks by his UK-based peers. Laila Majid and Louis Blue Newby explore the iconic DC Comics character, Swamp Thing, using innovative embryonic machine learning technology, while Andrew Pierre Hart takes us inside his former music studio as he samples The Matrix’s iconic character, Morpheus. Mark Leckey revisits Eastham Rake’s M53 motorway bridge, which served as the central setting for his recent Tate Britain exhibition, while Marcus Jefferson offers a personal and insightful documentation of daily life in his North-London neighborhood as a person of color. Alia Hamaoui‘s work distills myriad depictions of Islamic Paradise Gardens from various sources into a single, cohesive work of art, and Elliot Fox‘s found footage features immersive first-person perspective, a psychedelic soundscape, and Cornish subtitles. The cinema program offers a diverse range of perspectives and styles, showcasing the creative talent and innovation of UK-based artists.