Hi Subscriber,
Lucas Bononi, a contemporary figurative painter based in NYC, is
preparing for a solo show at Sugarlift in February 2022. Although he is
already a known and respected part of the NYC art scene, this is his
first solo show, as he has been studying full-time at Grand Central
Atelier for the past four years and only graduated this year. Now, he's
putting his new painting time to good use, working toward this show
only one month away.
Enjoy,
BoldBrush Studio Team
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The Forest, 2019, oil on panel
The Forest, 2019, oil on panel
He has participated in three group shows with Sugarlift previously, and
he loves what Sugarlift is all about. "It's in a premium Chelsea
location, but I love the fact that they market affordable art to the
general public. I find that to be very important. I've met the gallery
owner several times and he is such a heartfelt person. I actually
pitched the idea of this show to him about a year and a half ago, when
I was in my senior year at Grand Central Atelier. At the time he just
said he'd think about it, which was honestly a good thing because at
the time most of my day was absorbed by academic studies." Only this
fall, after Lucas had graduated from GCA, did Sugarlift get back to him
about doing the solo show. "He said he wanted to give me an impossible
deadline, he asked if I could be ready in four months. And I said yes
because I'm like that about work. I had been thinking about this
concept ever since I pitched it the first time, so I was ready
mentally, but I had been so absorbed in my academic studies that I
hadn't had any time to put toward personal work." That meant that
nearly all of the show had to be created in these four months, but
Lucas has been excited about the opportunity to explore all of the
things he has been studying in new ways.
The concept for this show developed from the contrast between the
highly finished figure studies he did during the day at Grand Central
Atelier and his mentorship with abstract expressionist Paula Poons in
the evenings. "I was living two different lives, I would paint eight
hours a day at GCA as representationally as I could, and then spend
three hours working abstractly with my mentor. It was so interesting to
explore both the contrasts and the overlaps; my abstract teacher would
tell me to resolve the form in my abstract painting, and over at GCA,
where everything is resolved to a high degree, my teacher would be
talking about the abstract shapes. It made me realize that I've always
liked to be somewhere in the middle, but I don't necessarily like my
work to live in the grays, I like it to live in the black and whites. I
like certain parts to feel so highly resolved that it looks like it
took thousands of hours in front of the model, and other parts to be so
abstract that it feels like you had to explore yourself for thousands
of hours in order to achieve that. And so I set myself an unachievable
task, to capture both the most representational and the most abstract
in a single piece."
Since this is the first large body of personal work that Lucas has done
since completing his art studies, "The breakthroughs have been
exponential. I studied art full-time for eleven years and had this
subtle trajectory of artistic improvement through all of the studies
and all of the practice, but was more focused on learning than on my
personal voice. But then this show opened up and I knew on the inside
who I wanted to be and wanted to achieve that as quickly as possible,
because the show had a fixed deadline. So I've started trying new
things and then analyzing how natural it feels to me, and if it feels
natural I'll keep doing it. For example, I realized I work better
reductively than I do additively; I've been scraping off layers of
paint to get to different aesthetic reminisces in the under layers.
This is one of the many things I first discovered in school but am only
now fully making a part of my own process; when I was doing academic
drawing, I was often working reductively, using my eraser to hatch the
lights out of the shading. I was erasing more than I was actually
drawing. And I've started going for that in my paintings, I'll scrape
off paint in areas as another way of abstracting the form and giving
depth to the piece."
The show is titled "The Forest" because the combination of contrasts in
his technique is echoed in another contrast he's been thinking about a
lot lately: the chaos of living in the city mixed with the longing for
nature. Lucas grew up in Los Angeles and subsequently moved to San
Francisco and New York to study art, so he's been a city dweller most
of his life. "I have a longing for nature but never really embrace it.
So when I paint I try to have nature be the root of all my decisions,
and these new paintings are very much inspired by the ocean, the
forest, the mountains, alongside the figure. I've been exploring ways
to give the model an immediate connection to the concept of nature,
such as painting models with paint on them in a manner reminiscent of
tribal paint and using the paint to abstract the model so it sort of
meshes with the background; sometimes the figure will become something
very realistic and sometimes it's just a design element. I'm trying to
find different aspects of nature in each piece I paint, even in the
abstractions."
This show is just the latest form a theme that has been with him for
years. "It was totally subconscious, but this connection has always
been with me. I've always wanted to be a painter for as long as I can
remember. When I was five I started taking art classes. When I was
seven I started taking nude figure drawing classes - my mom had to sign
a waiver! - and around age nine I was part of a group show, and made a
painting for it titled The Mighty Forest. I have this goofy photo where
I'm with my sister at the gallery opening and it looks like she's my
date, we're both dressed up and it totally looks like I'm a grown up
artist already. But that painting was very similar to my painting The
Forest that I just did, which inspired the name of the whole show. I
didn't realize the connection until I saw that photo again recently,
and realized I'm continuing a series I started when I was nine years
old."
Lucas Bononi's solo show at Sugarlift will be opening on February 17,
2022. You can go over to Sugarlift's
website for updates, or follow Lucas on Instagram
for detail shots and
process clips.
Dead Roses, oil on panel
Dead Roses, oil on panel
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