In Vue Weekly: Attila Richard Lukacs / Polaroids

Originally from Vue Weekly, 19 March 2009
Attila Richard Lukacs / Polaroids / Michael Morris
Reviewed by Adam Waldron-Blain

Lukacs’ paintings are delicately balanced between logical unity and a jarring sense of the unreal, and each one contains several layers of reality that we understand separately as we experience the work, starting with Lukacs’ most clearly visible artifice in his paint and in nonsensical or non-naturalistic elements in the paintings, as he invokes a flock of flamingoes or floating text in “Camouflage.” The central figures of the paintings are where most of this complexity lies, as we are forced to reconcile the presentation of these figures, which exist between the heroic nude and the salacious, perhaps pornographic photograph, with our ideas of what the subcultural aesthetic they carry with them represents, as well as what the are doing.

Beyond this play of sex and violence, explicit or implicit depending on the painting, the Polaroids present another tense level of fiction. Separating the figures from their unreal surroundings and isolating them, their sense of exaggerated, muscly masculinity is changed significantly. In the paintings, despite their performances, the figures often seem curiously unaware of themselves, as to permit too much self-reflection would be to endanger their value as either fascists or pin-ups, by allowing just a touch of what is perceived as a femininity into their sealed-off, painted realities. Instead, their situations and actions seem routine, despite their nudity and sometimes absurdity, and Lukacs leaves his subjects with their grim facial expressions which are themselves a part of their uniform, a kind of posture of hardness and authenticity.

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