Polaroids: Attila Richard Lukacs and Michael Morris: Lavish Book on the Art of Attila Richard Lukacs [Hardcover]

Attila Richard Lukacs is a Canadian painter best known for his very large canvases of male figures in various forms of assimilation/confrontation. But this book reveals a technique not known to many of just how the artist arrives at his imaginative tableaux. This book represents a collection of polaroids - 12 per page - in which Lukacs places thought progressions as he develops ideas for canvases. The photographs are a catalogue from the exhibition in the Art Gallery of Alberta that featured the polaroid images of Lukacs along with the creative input of his partner, artist/curator Michael Morris. The result is a fascinating peak behind the mind of a create pair of artists explaining technique.

According to Wayne Baerwaldt, who wrote the fine essay that accompanies the work, explaining not only the justification for the exhibition but also the meaning to the artists: 'The instant portraits, taken by the thousands over the years, became an integral part of his painting process, anything but disposable ephemera. They became footnotes for manipulating images on canvas. Each Polaroid acts as a shorthand for figure studies that would inform the strategic planning of his elaborate and celebrated paintings. The photographic images allowed Lukacs to better place the painted representation of the whole or partial figure against variously charged foregrounds and backgrounds, permitting him to delve deep into art historical references and the structuring of representation. From a labyrinth of references, including Caravaggio and Goya, the sense of kinship and respect is obvious. What Lukacs so deftly pulled from the art historical carnage is a unique approach to perspectival angularity in his subjects. This approach skews realism and the irreal and gives his subjects an uneasy psychological edge. The real/irreal figures are conspicuous in another way. The majority of the Polaroids are of nude or semi-costumed skinheads reminiscent of a 19th and 20th-century Northern European ideal - the well proportioned, masculine, unself-consciously sensual male. Lukacs is attuned to the sepia toned appeal of the Aryan male and its periodical re-emergence as an ideal in the mass media, how that appeal plays upon strong desires, bringing knowledge and pleasure together in the recognition of a classic unity and order of the object of interest. It is as if Lukacs engages the Polaroids to revisit 19th-century rational knowledge of the organic coherence of everything that exists, and twist this philosophical sentiment slightly. Everything is ascribed an esthetic or skewed hedonistic value which unfolds in his engrossing paintings'.

This is a very well designed and produced 'catalogue' that serves more than an introduction to the art thoughts of Attila Richard Lukacs: this is an invitation to understand the very beginnings of a canvas in a manner that few other artists will share. It makes for a fine book as well as a very useful tool for art students to study process. Grady Harp, January 11

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