Painting & Printmaking School of Fine Art
Lucas Allan
Allan delves into the realms of certainty and intuition. Engaging in games of association within imagery that, in turn, characterises his work. Relying on the pleasures of the ‘self- taught’, welcoming error, improvising constraints that cause the viewers senses and standards to deviate from their resting state. This practice produces an outcome of the non-narrative, the non-restrained, retaining these layered fragments of grain and abstractions that emerge in his paintings and photographs. There is an overarching visual search within the work, deriving from both figuration and abstraction, a play of image and its ghost, of apparition and its shadow. The subjects are often amalgamations of abstractions, forms are then found within them, typically faceless, or, more precisely, disembodied. The works intentions are not to demystify the image but to rather praise the process that comes from intuition in find these apparitions that appear within the work. Curating a distilled moment of a pause, akin to holding your breath.
Photography
My works fundamental intentions of abstraction are characterised by my relationship with polaroid. This image form has a throbbing quality, a vibration that emanates from their mutations and fragility. These apparitions are predisposed within the polaroid. A production of an image with speed, repetition and syncopation, precisely the frenetic perspective of a skateboarder. I often reflect on the Japanese word, ‘Setsunai’ (切ない), meaning the edge of a memory, once bright, now faded. Reflected in the shadowed qualities my polaroid’s have inherently. An intimate collision of silver halide emulsion and development nuclei, like skin on concrete or optimistically wheels on concrete.
