According to Maurice Denis's incisive definition that painting is, first and foremost, a flat surface covered with colors arranged in a certain order, its stillness remains an inherent quality. Even when capturing movement or action, painting petrifies a single moment of the process, transforming it into a sustained, mute, and immobile representation. Yet a different transformation permeates Andrea Luzi’s distinctive practice as he puts the eternal cosmic change and ruckus between matter and energy at the center of 8, his Vienna solo debut with Barvinskyi Art Gallery.
By deliberately shifting his interest from the world as we see it to the intersection of ancient myths, pagan rituals, and esoteric sacred art, Luzi’s work captures the threshold where physical reality and spiritual energy continuously shape and dissolve one another. For Luzi, everything starts with a “gut feeling” that takes physical form through an instinctive, gesture-based process of removal. Mixing influences from graffiti, music, archeology, and folklore, his practice sits somewhere between craft and performance, calligraphy and painting, myth and speculation. His process bypasses the rational brain, as the image is first excavated semi-consciously from the paint with instinctual, chaotic, fast-paced energy. Drawing from his background in monotype printmaking, he creates his visuals by wiping, scraping, and carving away layers of wet, heavy paint. The primordial-like, anthropomorphic swirling and tangle of initial marks creates a pulsating, vibrating effect that is later fine-tuned through volume, light, shadow, and form. All those together eventually coalesce into a range of subjects, each undergoing intense distortion. This approach stands in stark contrast to traditional definitions of painting, pushing its significance beyond representation into the realm of cultic manifestation and conjuring.
The exhibition presents a selection of pseudo-artifacts from a world that refuses to stand still. This pulsating, non-settling quality permeates traditionally stiff portraits, ceremonial depictions of birth, and emotional confluence, culminating in a frame-by-frame animation-like display. Within the dark, viscous surfaces of these canvases, different forms take shape, merely suggesting recognizable imagery. Caught in the midst of a transitional state between matter and energy, these “forms of light” are constantly shifting, suspended in a fever-dream-like state. Attuned to a much subtler, mystical frequency, the work goes beyond mere depiction and functions as a relic or ritual instrument, demanding that the viewer actively engage in the process of decoding it. By doing so, they sustain this parallel universe through their presence and observation, fully activating its unsteady nature via the ritualistic figure-8 trajectory across the space. —Saša Bogojev
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