Trafalgar 1965

Curator: Right, let’s take a closer look at Sven Lukin’s “Trafalgar” from 1965. What are your immediate impressions? Editor: Stark. Almost aggressively clean. The limited palette – greys, blues, that startling band of orange – it all feels very deliberate, calculated. It almost doesn’t want to be touched. Curator: It's mixed media, actually; that sense of flatness you're picking up contrasts interestingly with its sculptural presence. Lukin builds out from the painted plane. Editor: Ah, I see it now! It tricks the eye. And it's that combination, that playful subversion of material, that intrigues me most. Knowing the labor, I am trying to find hints of it. I see sanding marks and edges that speak to the artist's interventions, those places feel like a kind of poetics of the process. The way materials can shift and bend under intentional manipulation. Curator: I think you're right that the imperfections elevate it somehow. It almost makes me wonder if "Trafalgar" isn't just about shapes but about tensions and how different elements relate, kind of fighting for the spotlight. Like our relationship with geometry; do we try to bend it to our will, or do we acknowledge that it has a life, a voice of its own? Editor: In that case, Lukin seems torn! Are we meant to believe it is hard-edged or that it comes off of the painting to fall into the third dimension. Which reading do you believe takes more attention? Curator: That duality, for me, is the most delicious part. It's this dance between minimalism and something almost playful, a sort of secret language whispered between the shapes. I'd bet that there's no specific way in which to read the object. It leaves room to have our individual interpretation, and it welcomes the mess. Editor: So, rather than finding the 'truth' in materials, as I might often argue, this allows materials to remain plural, and subjective, informed by experience, or simply, whatever baggage we arrive with. It makes process personal. Curator: Exactly! So what started as seemingly cold becomes oddly inviting. Editor: The thing continues to grow on me. It might just make me reassess my notions of postminimalism... perhaps the cold is where the warmth really lives.