Jonathan Lasker, in great shape – Liberation

The Thaddaeus Ropac gallery hosts the work of the New York painter, adept at fragmented patterns and protean brushstrokes.

On one of his paintings exhibited at the Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, Jonathan Lasker painted his name in large letters, in childish handwriting, with the initials in cursive capital letters like at school. It’s a joke. Because a Lasker is recognizable at first glance. And the American artist (born in 1948) knows it. Not that he is a star, except for insiders, but, since the 70s, his style, his line, his compositions do not deviate from a line that aims to deliver “a kind of kit image or a puzzle”, in his words. On the canvases, there is a whole range of shapes and patterns (geometric or not) as well as a variety of types of brush strokes: the pressed brush which makes squiggles, the overloaded brush which generously butters the surface and the first-in-class brush that colors without overshooting. It could turn into a rat race if all these little people didn’t keep a good distance from each other. At Lasker, we don’t mix too much. We do not cross the Rubicon of white intervals which delimits the zone reserved for each. For example, in this web, Bold Horizon, there is, on the left, a crusty pink square, at the bottom right, a purple with a faded background, in the center a kind of disheveled head, a black squiggle, and, all the same, a black line drawing a rectangle, which negotiated a right of way on the terrain of each of its figures to cross or skirt them. Nevertheless, the terrain, the picture remains highly fragmented. Each of the forms cultivating his piece of canvas as he sees fit, that is to say by following a different pictorial strategy. Lasker’s painting would then be seen as a flattening, a crisis, an inventory of the different means and the history of painting, before total liquidation of the medium, more capable of deciding for a form rather than for a other, nor especially for a united composition. As if the painter had made his casting, gathered his actors on stage (certain motifs look like heads), and had left them, without further instruction, so that the earthy spectacle of estrangements, compromises, exchanges of good processes between brushstrokes. Or the spectacle of a painting comically and courageously delivered to itself.

Jonathan Lasker, New Paintings, at the Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, in Paris (75003), until July 30.