Everywhere Salvatore of Lucan’s art combines a rigorous and searching honesty about all the most characteristic aspects of a single place, time and self with the intense feeling of a world which is not that place and time – even his name: as much serious as joking, as much old as completely new.
If perspective is to visual art what drama is to theatre, then at the climax these paintings cause us to look through the eyes of a universal kinship
If perspective is to visual art what drama is to theatre, then at the climax these paintings cause us to look through the eyes of a universal kinship. Most of us love no-one except maybe our families and a few friends, but here for the brief period of observing we understand that everyone, no matter who they are to us, needs and is worth love – even if sometimes they also need forgiveness.
It may be (and strictly speaking there is no reason to believe not) that someday the view which is the heart of these paintings will become the global view. But for now, this perspective, arising from our own time in these paintings as from so many others before in other places, remains timeless: a perspective of un-time, of the future.
Even before LSD, the psychedelic had already revealed itself as the profoundest contribution to thought of so-called modernity. Its place is equal to that in Christianity of Christ’s atheism on the cross (God, why have you forsaken me?). Those words revealed to the few among so many Christians afterwards who saw that the profoundest divinity in the human condition is the same as its most abject and most material suffering, its barest abandonment.
If the divinity of wretchedness is the intellectual truth of Christian teaching, then the intellectual truth of modern positivist materialism is the psychedelic, which is about the beautiful and affective quality of things. If positivist materialism says we are protons and electrons, the psychedelic says this is what protons and electrons are like. In that strange sphere, it is possible for every convention and perception of form to melt away or else become completely different. We are forced to recognise ourselves as what Rilke called “Pollen of the blooming Godhead”.
From this standpoint, the psychedelic, Salvatore of Lucan devotes himself in his paintings to understanding its brutal and widespread counterpart, the intoxicant.
From this standpoint, the psychedelic, Salvatore of Lucan devotes himself in his paintings to understanding its brutal and widespread counterpart, the intoxicant.
The intoxicant lures us in with its dreamlike verisimilitude to psychedelic reality, with its altered experience of drunkenness/being high, combined with the avoidance of seriousness. But in the end this same mechanism serves only to increase suffering by making everything apart from intoxication less bearable, more difficult, less changeable, more dull, less psychedelic.
And as against this fear we lose the power to do anything other than repeat this intoxicating pseudo-experience, we change: the end-result of intoxication is deformity.
In ‘The Castle Lounge,’ ‘Family Time/Nanny’s Shriek’ and ‘Me Being an Arse’ the subject is alcohol. But ‘Work’, which depicts two employees of what seems to be an IT-retail shop with a skeleton below under the floorboards starting a painting, and ‘Me as a Blemmyae’, where he is staring intensely at his phone, set up for Zoom with a ring-shaped webcam light, are also about intoxication.
All ideologies – as well as ambition, money, power, and everything else that places the virtual above the actual – are intoxicants.
All ideologies – as well as ambition, money, power, and everything else that places the virtual above the actual – are intoxicants.
Currently what is missing in the public debate about alcohol is a sense of how it differs from these other things not in kind at all, only by degree.
In these paintings usually the characters get drunk, and always they are subjected to the intoxicated fantasies of a broader world. The two indications of this are deformity, which is one of Salvatore of Lucan’s most developed tools; and defiance, which is his most impressive.
Traditionally speaking the deformed is the other – hence all those fascinated descriptions and collections of monsters in Antiquity and the Middle Ages from which comes the ‘Blemmyae’ of one of the paintings – here deformity is about the self: the intoxicated self, deformed and distended by falseness.
But there is also the psychedelic self of whom deformity is the central condition: this is the defiant self, whom we can see in the eyes of every painting, the green and beautiful eyes for example of ‘Me as a Blemmyae’, and the deep and questioning eyes in ‘The Castle Lounge’.
The eyes of people in these paintings designate something in them that is strictly their own, that does not belong to anybody.
The intoxicant offers an escape from suffering and death, but its price is deformity and at last self-destruction. If the psychedelic promises to transcend these it is only by confronting them in full horror: because horror, always, eventually, when you look at it for long enough, becomes beauty.
In the middle of this exhibition there are two paintings: ‘Forget Me Nots’, of a pot of flowers with a skeleton underground beneath them, and ‘Dead Present’, after which the exhibition is named and the smallest painting by far – of the same flowers dead and bunched hanging upside-down by a rope with a cross-shaped knot a few centimetres above in a Tiepolo-blue background, like the sky. In the first, life is stalked by death; in the second, death meets the open air of life.
There are many reasons to think our place and time is hopeless. But this exhibition shows that whatever else at least some part of it has not given up on itself. It is still possible for there to be among us an artist, who, even if just while painting, strives to comprehend the task of universal love.
Dead Present is showing at the Kevin Kavanagh gallery until 23 April – there is no entry fee.
