Detour 2012

Sven Lukin’s 'Detour' looks like it was built, assembled, and painted, all as one thing. It’s like a painting that wants to be a sculpture, or maybe the other way around. The colors are just a little off-kilter. The pinks and yellows are bright but they are cut with black and gray, so everything feels a bit broken or used. Check out the surface: it’s rough, as if Lukin applied the paint quickly, not worrying about perfection. You can almost feel the movement of his hand, the speed of his brushstrokes. It gives the work a raw, immediate kind of energy. And then, there’s that dark column slicing through the middle. It's like the whole thing is about to fall apart, like everything is tilting, turning. I’m thinking of someone like Elizabeth Murray, who also liked to push painting in a similar direction, trying to see how far you can stretch it before it breaks. It seems like this work is asking us to think about painting not as a picture, but as an event.