Double Play: Jonathan Lasker

Jonathan Lasker’s paintings are pictures in every sense. From the start of his practice in the 1970s, between the emphatically non-representational, pared-down objecthood of Minimalism and an increasingly dematerialized, conceptual turn, his work grappled with contradiction in a redefining moment for painting. While studying at the California Institute of the Arts, he initiated an analytical engagement with the medium, posing painting as a question of picturing, both in its construction and perception – opening up a line of critical inquiry that continues to inform his work today.

Lasker’s response to the moment developed into the ‘80s through an expansion of pictorial space. Taking up the intuitive gestures and formal structures of abstraction, his paintings introduce perspective through implied recession. In layerings and interplays of color and form, illusionism is eluded, even as its references are used to generate space. Varied elements of pictorial representation collectively suggest a picture, at times conjuring landscapes or interiors, depths to be moved into, while standing for themselves. Through them, scenes are continuously restaged, positions restated. A ground for complex exchange is offered, a reappraisal of the nature of the picture, its function, its relation to the world and to us – situated somewhere between conceptual and concrete.

Doubles, dualities, and recurrences often run through Lasker’s decades-spanning painting practice. In Double Play, a solo exhibition presented at Galerie Thomas Schulte, this is brought to the fore in a selection of Lasker’s large, bold paintings from the mid to late 1980s, alongside recent works distilled to small formats on white grounds. They unfold through contrasts: in forms and their shadows, silhouettes, or negative spaces; they take shape in inversions, outlines, and amplifications. At times, more systematic doublings form a shaky field of tension, becoming geometric patterns that wobble or shift.

The early works featured here are rooted in a period in which Lasker’s self-reflexive, conceptual approach to painting began to coalesce. It was during the mid ‘80s that Lasker developed his ongoing working method of composing detailed painted oil studies, which are then transformed and scaled to the dimensions and medium of large paintings. More than a duplication of a single image, this deliberate process brings two into coexistence, each carrying marks of distinct origin — from the expressively intuitive to the precisely controlled. As the artist has described: “a mark in two speeds”.

Throughout, collections of marks and objects are assembled like vectors: graphical elements, quasi-biological carriers with the potential to mutate, or relational points in space. In Cultural Promiscuity (1986), visual repetition occurs primarily within the image’s patterned ground. The painting’s title gestures towards Lasker’s idiosyncratic visual vocabulary, which, through continual recursions, reinventions, and changing relations that escape direct reference, draws on contrasting styles of Modernist abstraction, traditional pictorial forms, and broader visual culture. Here, two yellow structures, like sets of double windows, stand at different depths within the image: one echoes the other, so close up in the foreground that its bottom edge is cut off. A similar form, more haphazardly composed of deep green lines, is multiplied to constitute the background from edge to edge, becoming smaller towards the top right corner, receding into space. The figural quality of this off-kilter, grid-like arrangement is heightened through its yellow counterparts, which in turn appear more structural. Another element occupying this space is a rough ‘H’ shape with two horizontal bars. It is made up of layered, clashing strokes in muddy primary colors. Perhaps more than the transparent forms, it seems to open into the ground, as something behind.

Even in synthesis, marks, lines, and colors retain a singular, movable demeanor, announced in intersections and overlaps as much as in gaps. Through repeated motions, shapes are created that in turn repeat, referring to each other and effectively back to themselves. In Return The Favor (1986), what could be seen as a figure ascending a staircase and casting its shadow on the adjacent wall, may alternatively seem like a puzzle piece that has picked up velocity as it leaves its space and slides forward in the picture plane. Against contrasting pink, the solid green shape oscillates between a mark of displacement, an opening to be returned to, or one of two concurrent states that only exist side by side.

Where the earlier works are characterized by floating movement and expansiveness in their layered, active grounds, the recent works presented here convey a sense of standing in place, even if restlessly so. The primary object in each is a lookalike of the others — perhaps a single character set in and responding to changing scenes. Nearly as large as the surfaces they occupy, like a zoomed-in view of a larger painting, the objects in these small works are more bounded in terms of space. At the same time, they press forward, as though about to step beyond the bright white space of the picture.

The elements in these later works have a particularly firm presence. They are set apart from the earlier paintings here, though, at times, we may sense their beginnings — in a certain combination of colors, a certain quality of marks. The central objects are iterations of a form that has become more fixed in recent years, though its white body and wavering black outlines call back to the loose forms of some of Lasker’s earliest paintings. Their figural appearance, vaguely resembling a head with a snout, like a cartoon character, is enhanced by an inclination to read the works as portraits. In the lower right of each, this form is partially hidden behind an impastoed object that builds the picture plane outward — cross-hatched lines in primary colors, a flattened bubble-gum slab that is also head-like, and a looping black scribble. These sets of figures bring the different objects that make up Lasker’s painterly world into close correspondence, like a one-on-one conversation.

A kind of double vision occurs: the central figure is defined by a dual black outline, or a line and its shadow — achieving a buzzing, exhilarating effect. Where lines entwine, crossing over or under each other and jutting out in places like barbed wire, another layer declares itself. The space that opens between them may belong to the figure or to the ground — a subject that doubles as an object, and vice versa. In the exhibition’s titular work, Double Play (1987), a form that could be a land mass seems to face its own partially hidden reflection, as though peeking outward through the slats of window blinds. Perhaps it offers a view to an inverse world — closely formed yet distantly held by the act of looking. Even so, the connection between the two proves a porous one, like a being in two places at once.

Text by Julianne Cordray