WRITINGS OF THE SUICIDAL MIDGET

Location: boul. 8 September, 4 (groundfloor space), Skopje
Opening: Tuesday, 6 November 2012, 20.00 hrs
The exhibition can be visited from 7-10 November, 17.00-20.00 hrs

KOOPERACIJA would like to thank Filip Spasovski for the space made available.

Fragment 1. Introduction

Like in any other by-the-book analysis of an author’s works, we can (try to) locate the sources of inspiration, somewhere in art history, and use it as an entry point. In Vladimir Lukash’s case those would most likely be Grosz and Dix, but one would have to mention also the brutal caricaturing of figures, crudely direct and reminding of Dubuffet, and especially Basquiat and Haring, oscillating at times between the one’s chaotic lucidity and the other’s masterful simplification and laconic stylization.

But we are not talking about some “new objectivity”, but the good, old objectivity, which for better or worse stays beyond perception and surpasses the capacity of our minds.

Vladimir Lukash and his delicate perforations onto the hard focus of reason, a feature or rather ability that saves us from madness; little holes carefully drilled so that through them would drip a few fragments of some other, strange reality and readiness to risk entering the chaos of madness.

Fragment 2. Lukash and the local “art history”

Vladimir Lukash is not an author who is in a frantic race with art history, with the “big scene”, with its perpetual problems and challenges. Still, unlike many others, he reveals his own awareness of many specific and serious questions through multitudes of details in his pictures, and replies to some of them with idiosyncratic and humorous details, such as in “Space for Abstract Art”, “Here is Where the Main Event in the Picture Is to Happen”, “Quotes from Wittgenstein”, etc.

It should be underlined though that it is not at all difficult to make out the author’s awareness of what is happening around him, his capacity to absorb enormous amounts of information and to offer a cautious comment to each and every one. It is a specific, subtle, contemporary, artistic kind of engagement.

And only due to his modesty and unimposing character is he positioned somewhere at the margins, just like some of his characters, out of the centre, somewhere there among the market stands of the self-defined space, the own, personal space in continued pre-construction. Why? Because, probably according to him that is where the real life is, as some kind of footnote to the mainstream. His to date position at the margins is a deliberate decision, but by no means does this marginality relate to its intrinsic qualities.

Still, Vladimir Lukash is in no way an anonymous figure or an outsider; he is very well known in certain arts circles and has a select public, while hi work is especially valued by part of the artists. This very exhibition results from the support he enjoys from those to whom thinking and affection are most important, at least in the specific world of arts. This exhibition is so important because it can correct the professionals’ “omissions”.

Fragment 5. On space, narration and characters

In Vladimir Lukash’s works the space itself is paradoxically constructed and simultaneously deconstructed. The narration unravelling on the two-dimensional surface is not linear, it is fragmented and moves into several directions at the same time, suddenly changing course, after which two, three or more different stories cross each other, then it stops in a written or drawn break, continues from an unexpected corner, which in that moment is outside our focus. This is a structure with no defined centre.

Lukash’s oeuvre gives the impression of a hidden fund, from which you can dig out countless random elements, or pieces that can pop up in various angles, at the margins, to be deleted or remain unfinished.

It is an immense and fantastic gallery of characters, some imagined, some historic, and others fictional-historic (fragments of people, decomposed, strange, even bizarre creatures, and even more bizarre situations). Among the multitude of complex relations within the framework of chaos, one can discover fragments of Hitler, de Niro, Nietzsche, Schönberg, Händel’s wife, a skinny child with red cheeks, who is sure that when he grows up he will be a dictator, and countless others. The really committed might want to endeavour in counting them. I encourage them to try.

Vladimir Janchevski
Fragments from the text dedicated to Vladimir Lukash
Skopje, 24 October-4 November 2012

A few figures from my childhood on Atinska #12/15, 2nd entrance (2011)

Vladimir Lukash was born in 1978 in Skopje. He finished his secondary education at the music high school “Ilija Nikolovski-Luj” in Skopje and at the moment he is a graduate of instrumental jazz department at the faculty for music of “Goce Delchev” university in Shtip. So far he has exhibited his work at four individual exhibitions between 2007-2012 in various towns in Macedonia and at several group exhibitions. Lukash works with drawings, illustration, performance, video, and also takes part in a few experimental musical outlets.