The Rorschach inkblot test, familiar both as a tool of serious psychiatry and as an ongoing subject of satire in popular culture, was developed in the early twentieth century by Swiss psychoanalyst Hermann Rorschach. This set of ten symmetrical abstract images has been used as a method of psychological evaluation to examine personality characteristics and emotional functioning, and to help diagnose psychoses. Characteristically, patients are shown each inkblot, and asked "What might this be?"
"What might this be?" indeed. This is the key question that arises in the minds of viewers who confront the ambiguous and mysterious images in artist Jonathan Lucas’s Rorschach Series. On the surface of things, one sees within an intimate frame, a shallow and suffocating space filled with roiling folds. Palette is limited, though warm from the selenium toner employed in the printing process, and pattern prevails. Each image presents a small drama of light and shadow, forms in flux, and deep unsettling voids. This phenomenon is clearly composed of organic material – the re-contextualized and morphed skin of human hands and fingers. Yet this also feels like a place, with visual references to topography and landscape.
Lucas presents not a body, but the idea and visceral feeling of the bodily. With camera and computer, he creates pictures that refer simultaneously to a body’s interior and exterior, to an organic world seen at both ocular and microscopic scales. The artworks are spawned from a bizarre coupling of medical imaging and biomorphic Surrealist abstraction, and evoke a host of associations. Their unnatural twistings and torsions imply suffering and age. The small scale suggests the tenderness of a thing closely observed. And sex is everywhere, suggested by erectile protrusions and dark sucking orifices. Lucas presents the Body Grotesque, a monstrous agglomeration of organs and sensations that attracts and repulses, feels pain and promises pleasure. It is the Body Electric, but it itches within its own skin.
This body is also, somehow, a place. The series, in its entirety, resembles an aerial survey of an exotic, undiscovered, or completely alien world. Remote sensing (another leap in scale) reveals a land with a unifying terrain of rippling ridge lines, odd hills, shifting sands, and deep pools or sinkholes. Here is a quasi-volcanic landscape in flux, with little to suggest life save its very composition – the crust is skin, the world a body.
Lucas has intermeshed patterns of biology and geology, as well as our emotional responses when encountering strange beings and unfamiliar terrain. His images are meditations on elemental human experiences that range from the sensations of our very own viscera to our comprehension of the immensity of the planet. What might this be? Everything – but seen through a glass, darkly.
-Nick Capasso, Curator, DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park
Copyright © 2008 Joanthan Lucas Art. All Rights Reserved.
Worcester, MA