Review: Joan Lalucat

«I make images that intellect will never make». Joan Lalucat doesn't beat about the bush. He opens a book collecting his final project for his Higher Diploma in Illustration with this line by Francis Bacon. The British painter's influence is central to the young Catalan artist's work. The decomposition of bodies, the blood, the taste for portraits set in empty, abstract spaces, the provocation and the investigation of the human soul (or of psychology, as the artist likes to call it) are the elements that draw a connection between Lalucat and Bacon.

Flesh, bones and blood

The title of his latest collection leaves no room for doubt either. Joan Lalucat (Barcelona, 1985) dissects bodies to decipher brains. In Pervers i insolent the sitter's chest and face come apart at the joints, the flesh softens until it almost turns into a pink fluid. The mouth and the teeth are deformed while the lower lip seems to grow down to the chest. Only the eyes stay untouched, small, animal.

In L’aprobació del ser superior, the sitter appears clothed, but the head is a lipless stump with raw gums. And in Una visita inesperada the expressionism takes on a grim tone.

With this series of portraits, Lalucat is after a double goal. First, he tries to catch our sensory attention. An artwork gets in through the senses first, leaving the intellect aside. These portraits disturb, wake you up, needle you. We can also smile at them, but it's that tense laugh that keeps looking sideways.

Second, the Catalan artist tries to connect with our brain, proposing an investigation of human psychology, of those uncontainable emotions that (de)form our character. We are fury, morbid curiosity, cruelty. We are all that we see in others, but not in ourselves.

From Velázquez to Bacon (and to Lalucat) the distance isn't that great. The aim is the same: to catch the human soul on a canvas. Only the techniques change… and the times. Lalucat's portraits are frightening, but you can't really say that Innocent X makes you want to go for a drink either…

Collages and mixed media

Even more interesting, if that's possible, are the artworks grouped under the series «Collages and mixed media». Lalucat starts from images taken from magazines and newspapers and produces artworks that knife the viewer. Their titles don't go unnoticed either: Autolesió, Violació, etc.

The Catalan painter surely has black humour to spare. Many of the photos he takes are of models from adverts. The toothpaste-ad smile of the character starring in Autolesió clashes with the act he has just committed, all of it wrapped in friendly blue tones.

In Tens tota la meva atenció, the real image takes on much more weight. Lalucat deforms the mouth and adds legs in an impossible position. Again, we smile, but from a safe distance, just in case the model decides to go for our jugular in the blink of an eye. In La Caça, on the other hand, there's no trace of real images, everything focuses on a grotesque being with its mouth and hand covered in blood.

Beginnings

If we go back in time and take a look at Lalucat's oldest artworks, we see that the Catalan artist has become baconized. The portraits that appear in his book collecting his illustrations, such as Nostalgia or Més enllà dels pensaments (also called Melancolía), show far less decomposition of the figures. The Barcelona-born artist had experimented with synaesthesia, with the fusion of painting and sound. In Nostalgia, for instance, rain accompanied the viewing of the artwork, trying to build sensory bridges to explain, once again, what lies behind emotions and the way we interpret them.

In painterly terms, some of the artworks from this period are very interesting, as in the case of La recepció, where the figure takes on mystical shades thanks to the colour harmonies and the slight deconstruction into small fragments of colour.

But years ago Joan Lalucat was already showing his fondness for the murky, for the dark side, as two hard-hitting artworks show: Susto 2 and Americana. They are paintings close to fantasy imagery, almost horror. Munch would be proud too.

We invite you to visit Joan Lalucat Vehil's gallery on Artelista.