Attila Richard Lukacs

From voyeur to party animal: Attila Lukacs’s latest show elucidates the nightlife scene of a notorious New York club frequented by the artist after he’d returned from his Berlin sojourn. As Lukacs told me some time ago, a friend used to send him Calvin & Hobbes cartoon clippings from home. It was a way of keeping in touch, and Lukacs found it amusing, so much so he named the pet monkey he carried around the clubs, night spots and cafes Hobbs.

As a series of paintings, “HOBBS” is nothing if not a celebration of good times. Based on 17 Polaroids sent to Lukacs circa 1990–91 by Paul Jones, the proprietor of Jones Antiques on King’s Road in Chelsea, London, the Polaroids captured the essence of a scene that vaporized, but one that so many remember even now. Lukacs’s recent works from those Polaroids build an auspicious narrative series. The paintings have a filmic sensibility, but the story they tell in freeze-frame painted sequences records moments at Kinky Gerlinky, the Café de Paris in West End London and Trudi Partridge’s West End Council flat with an ever so slight sense of the time. Polaroids do conjure up the 1980s—think of Nan Goldin, or Warhol for that matter, and the Studio 54 scene. Paintings of Polaroids, on the other hand, reawaken a romanticism, transferring a value from the ephemeral Polaroid to painting, a long tradition about which Lukacs knows a lot.

When Vancouver Art Gallery curator Scott Watson engineered his “Young Romantics” show in 1985, a fresh crop of Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design painters (Graham Gillmore, Angela Grossman, Attila Richard Lukacs, Vicky Marshall, Philippe Raphanel, Charles Rea, Derek Root and Mina Totino) were suddenly in the limelight in “the Van.” It was Scott Watson’s sense that these painters were reacting to “the slick, polished look of the world of manufactured images they live in.”

These new “HOBBS” paintings are a long way from the Attila Richard Lukacs Berlin “E-Werk” paintings, named after a night spot in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin, where Lukacs transferred the grandeur of Romantic painting to a post-punk, skinhead, subculture culture. With a Studio Residency Program at the Kunstlerhaus Bethanian, in the mid- to late ’80s, Lukacs painted any number of heroic body set-ups and positionings. His mastery of textures, colours, depths, all on a grand scale, were ambitious, and remarkable.

With “HOBBS” at Macaulay & Co. in 2017, we have party groups— less solemn scenarios and less conclusive, too. Stylistically, there is something of Oskar Kokoshka’s commitment to the canvas as a space for expression, and Lukacs pulls it off. Lukacs’s “HOBBS” paintings are less caught up in art historical jargon, but what they do accomplish as paintings is to move art into the theatre of life, something the darker works from earlier periods also did but in stylistic forms. We sense Lukacs was developing a little under the neo-expressionist cadence, but extending it much farther into a reinvention of histories. For all the attention to style, gesture and set-up in Attila’s Berlin paintings, there was something transparent, as if it could all change. Between the paint strokes, the message was: nothing was permanent. With this current series we are caught up in a moment, and history becomes personal, not political. The confusion of pop culture is still here, but it is less threatening, more amusing. The titles speak of the irony of the times, and of art’s ambiguous place in the story of life. How could it be any other way? One painting, for example, titled Hobbs ascending the staircase, 2017, is an off-the-cuff aside to Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. Hobbs in the Grotto, 2017, is another suggestive title, and the allusions are the ghosts in these paintings. They jump back and forth in time sequences just as they undoubtedly do in real life; so many figures, regrettably, are gone from those times due to the AIDS epidemic.

In his studio, collaging elements, pull ing images together, as assemblage, Lukacs is preoccupied— as any person should be—with the moment. And these “HOBBS” paintings celebrate Lukacs’s life’s experience, in simple animated shorts from Polaroids—all about painting. ❚

“HOBBS” was exhibited at Macaulay & Co. Fine Art, Vancouver, from September 16 to October 21, 2017.

John K Grande is a poet, art writer and curator. He will be curating “Richard Watts: Canoe People” at the Tom Thomson Gallery in Owen Sound in 2018.