To be discovered: the quasi-science of Adrien Lucca

When it comes to Adrien Lucca, one of the few Brussels-based artists born in the 1980s to have a solo show in a public institution of the city, seizing the drifting border where science ends and art begins is a challenging task.

His drawings and prints are the result of years of research in the realm of color theory and light behavior as well as a sheer passion for the mathematical approach in the art making. With no surprise, it is the heritage of 20th century music composers such as Giacinto Scelsi and the Spectralist Horațiu Rădulescu that Lucca quotes as his strongest source of inspiration.

We visited his last solo exhibition at the Centrale Electrique, in which he presents a wide collection of his pictures or, as he likes to call them, mini retrospectives about time frames in his research-based practice. With intentional refusal for preparatory sketches, these drawings and prints include the totality of the investigations within certain topics. D65 n.3 (2012) for instance, is a drawing on paper where the artist explores the concepts of visibility and invisibility in grey backgrounds.

Devoid of the classical attention to aesthetic beauty, Adrien Lucca blindly creates compositions that are in fact the visual output on paper and canvas of complex formulas and mathematical experiments carried out with self-coded computer software. When both the lab work and technical realization are taken into account, it is no wonder that every picture requires no less than four months to be completed.

Despite of what it may seem, Lucca’s works are more than scientific sets of rules translated into pictures. We believe it is the unavoidable artistic subjectivity that moves within the plethora of laws of physics and psychophysics what is being restated here. This happens for example in the stunning craftsmanship of his drawings and their meticulously painted networks of marks and dots, a skillful labour that takes us back to the ancient time of monastic dedication and precision in the technique of handmade books.

And in the personal progression of Lucca’s artistic practice, the more recent prints exhibited at Centrale Electrique and their implicit mechanical reproduction are distancing from the subjectivity of the artist only according to a superficial analysis. We see instead these prints as part of the Lucca’s own voice possibly more than the drawings, since what they represent is the specificity of the artist’s own printer itself in a given time as the machine was an extension of the maker’s senses and body.

Stemming from an inverted test on the electromagnetic spectrum, the piece Goethe’s Thinking Experiment: How Newton’s Spectrum Would Appear If The Sky Were Luminous And The Sun Were Black (2014) works as a mechanical and visual interpretation given by the machine of a topic chosen by the artist: Goethe’s dissertation on colors in response to Newton’s theories on the light (an issue we have recently discussed on our website in connection to its great influence on how art has been perceived in modern time).

Working as an ID card of the printer that serves for the recognition of its specificity, Gamut In The CIE u’v’ 1976 Chromaticity Diagram is perhaps the extreme unification between the artist and machine since, in the guise of an inverted medical check, what this colorful shape consists of is a human scan of the body and functions of a technological inanimate object.

November 2, 2018