about
What does it mean to look at a painting? At a body?
Much has been made of the role of the gaze in art- in its production, and in the experience of looking at it. Theresa Lucey offers us a gaze that is unflinching. Her figures- largely female, nude or nearly so- present themselves to us as variously coiled in tension, literally pressed down by the weight of domestic objects. A pair of lovers lock in an embrace of knotted limbs.
These paintings are distinctly uncomfortable, even when the figures seem to be at rest. In fact, the figures seem most natural when they are slumped in exhaustion. These figures, when they return our gaze, do as an act of accusation, implicating the viewer as an agent in their exhaustion.
Lucey exploits the acidic, bleaching effects of refracted digital blue light. The way we look at each other, mediated by screens, becomes the way we look at ourselves, and are looked at by others.
That which can be looked at also looks back at us. Lucey forces us to a reckoning with the gazing object. We are simultaneously its consuming voyeur, and the subject of its voyeuristic gaze.
-Carlye Frank
January, 2020
words from the artist
I paint in response to living and to better understand myself and others. Self-portraiture is how I navigate my experiences. I do this by pulling from the life that I know and exposing it to others. I am interested in vulnerability, and the depiction of a bare-faced inner life.
My instincts are figurative and nude. Nude self-portraiture has become greatly important to me in my efforts to tackle fear with defiance. I’m fascinated by the difference between nudity and nakedness, and the relationship between physical comfort and psychological discomfort. I am reaching for an inner reality and the sensitivity of others through figuration, transparency, internal significance, pictorial arrangement, and skilled execution.I subscribe to the intellectual vigor of figurative art.
Serving as a perfect marriage between the physical and the intangible, the human body performs the inescapability of the past and the inevitability of mortality. The temporary nature of the human form leads me to appreciate life in the moment. It is the body that is peculiar to the time we have on this plane of existence, and I intend to use my time to investigating it.
Figurative art has existential relevance, and it reminds us that we exist despite the fact that we live in a universe which seems incompatible with human existence. Figurative art allows for the preservation of what is being eroded from our reality.The most difficult thing about self-portraiture is that the self is changeable, fading and impermanent, and so you must confront this in order to capture it. Self-portraiture can be embarrassing and uncomfortable but it is my hope that this discomfort will yield the most wisdom. I create self-portraiture in mass quantity in hopes that my repetitive process will offer and reveal deeper meaning for my body of work.
Painting does not offer answers to life’s questions, but it has the power to slow down thought and allow for deeper introspection, as well as set the table for a greater conversation. Through the act of painting I battle the temporary nature of the human body, the intractable ego, and my reluctance to surrender control. This is the existential backbone of my process. The artist must work to live and live to work, and find their place in an absurd world. Find joy in the questioning act of art making, make no attempt to escape the meaninglessness through pacifism, and face the chaos with awareness.