Michi Lukas
Black & White Studies
Melancholy vs. form
In a moment of pensive avocation pigment in the form of black powder has been blown and then fixed on canvas. The culm constitutes of sharp particles. Therefore we are dealing with an explosive primary space, for the other rather classical space consists of angles and ends of rectangles that fragmentally lay on top of each other, six, sometimes 8… or perhaps an endless quantity of rectangles. These clamps of outlines, arbors and lines on a breezy black, stemming from common watercolor, are stretching over the body of the painted surface.
They are emerging diaphanously, but are staying unalterably and very present. The large painting holds in addition several lines of flight and appears slightly illusional. It is flashing. I have asked Michi (Michael Lukas) when we examined his works on paper and his prints… what are you saying… there we have the unsophisticated paper, the primitive printing method and the image of irritating marks of decay… can one understand this as a yearning for time and notion… is this to be interpreted as restraint in the face of institutionalized constitution of painting?
Those you can barely legitimize in the present world? Michi abnegates the restraint part. It is more some sort of melancholy in action… in resistance to institutional dictate of form, content and interpretation. Hence, the melancholy represents the image and a hidden picture puzzle of esthetics, that you chase in your paintings, I said. The return to painting!
All the paintings in the exhibition feature a strikingly simple gesture in their centre, mastered with oil in black and white brush strokes. S-forms and serpentines are often occurring. In front of these paintings we are continuing our intellectual pastime.
But hey, the melancholy found on the works on paper seems to have an exposed ally in the paintings: the release of intuition. Gesture as intuition along with melancholy as technique for the purpose of busting open the renunciation of institutionalized esthetics of painting.  Black & White studies is the title of the exhibition at Galerie Kunstbuero. Studies or traces of it are not to be discovered in a classical tenor. This way of painting arose from a long process.
Michi emphasizes: he fathoms studies as a congenial approach to the complex.