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.
