Lucas Soi, Glass House, 2009, pen and ink, 14 x 34 inches. Photo courtesy the artist.
Today BURNAWAY is pleased to present a creative piece on art and poetry by Shane Jones for our monthly column, Authors on Art, curated by Blake Butler.
I’ll admit that I’m a skank for artists who use color in interesting and brutal ways (Richard Colman and Matt Furie are brilliant rainbow-laced minds who come to mind), but recently what I’ve found is that those washing color completely out of their work can be truly devastating in the most wonderful and beautiful way.
What that “way” is, I couldn’t tell you. For me, it’s a really basic and somewhat child-like gut reaction where I can’t help but blurt out “Whoa,” or “Wooowwwww.”
A series of ten drawings, Cradle Stories by Lucas Soi, is an insanely detailed collection — each drawing takes about two months, working eight hours almost every day. Soi depicts a white-walled suburbia fucked with evil, technology, sex, death, drugs, and an odd/sweet innocence I can’t quite understand. Maybe it’s the drawing, Glass House, and the sadness of that title, and the girl being helped up from the broken table that emphasizes a painful lack of color in a scene that screams for color.
Or maybe it’s the way Lucas Soi isolates female characters inside these upper-class homes detailed with flat screen televisions, swimming pools, and that refrigerator completely stuffed with food. Why is something seemingly so innocuous, a refrigerator, so creepy and moving? Maybe it’s the juxtaposition of the girl smoking on the floor, the bare counters, the urge for comfort and escape inside this very real, but very dream-like world.
Lucas Soi, After the Dance, 2010, pen and ink, 14 x 34 inches. Photo courtesy the artist.
Or maybe this whole series is so powerful to me because of a larger juxtaposition. That is, the scenes in the homes (with their own kind of horror and sweetness) versus the scenes outside of the homes (with a more obtuse sense of evil and loss of innocence).
Lucas Soi, Black Mass, 2010, pen and ink, 14 x 51 inches. Photo courtesy the artist.
But what I started talking about was color and the lack of it in these works. The more I think about it, maybe there’s actually too much color in these works because Lucas Soi demands you to fill in the spaces with your own imagination – your eyes functioning as a kind of syringe in reverse, every color in your mind, now brought to the fore, is eager to be injected.
Shane Jones is the author of Light Boxes, published by Penguin Group in 2010. He recently started saying things at ivomiticecubessowhat.tumblr.com. A new novel is scheduled to be published by Penguin Group in early 2012.
Check BURNAWAY for Authors on Art curated by Blake Butler on the second Monday of every month!
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