Attila Richard Lukacs is lounging in the sun, smoking and trading wisecracks with an old friend from art-school days, when the friend invites him to a fetish party on the Downtown Eastside. The deal is you can't get in unless you're wearing at least one item of kinky clothing.

The opportunity seems tailor-made for Lukacs, whose personal life since graduating from Emily Carr Institute in 1985 has given new meaning to the term louche. Parties that lasted for days, acres of paintings of pierced and studded and leather-clad skinheads, crazy credit-card bills - Lukacs reveled in his bad-boy lifestyle and built a nasty reputation for himself.

Which is why his response to the invitation is so unexpected: "That sounds like fun, but you know, I don't go out in the evening any more."

Is this possible? That the most unfettered of Canada's young artists is mellowing as he approaches middle age? Lukacs smiles his famously cherubic smile. His head, shaved into scary Germanic exactitude for so many years, now sprouts a halo of soft curls. "I figured that so many of my friends were ending up in rehab, or worse, that maybe it was time I settled down a bit," he says.

Three years ago he moved to New York from Berlin and more or less retired from his night-owl ways. Now he keeps disciplined studio hours, working every day from 10 in the morning until seven at night, whether he feels like it or not. Most of the time, he goes to bed preoccupied with his painting. He has, he says, become very serious about his work.

The results, some of which mare on view this month at the Diane Farris Gallery in Vancouver, are stunning. Gone are the skinheads, gone are the homosexual lovers in their Mughal gardens, gone are the military cadets and rent boys. In their place is a glorious woodlot of pure painting. Superficially about tree trunks and pale skies, these 13 canvases can also be read as a profound effort as abstraction. Their smears and daubs of tar and their scoured-down, cream-coloured backgrounds are extremely dramatic, punctuated with grooves and scraper marks and exploding brushwork.

Lukacs seems even more physically involved with these works than usual. The brushstrokes are muscular, immensely confident. The forms of the tree trunks thrusts into space as mightily as if they were urged on by pile drivers. The roofing tar pigment gleams like blackstrap molasses. Standing in front of Lukacs' tree paintings, you can feel his ardour and his full-to-bursting intentions.

Nor is the energy only on the surface of the canvas. The images themselves hop about in a fusillade of retinal excitement. Allow your eye free rein and the painted forms begin to flip-flop. Sometimes you are at the bottom of a vast tree, looking up into its branches. But watch for a moment and suddenly you're at the top of a tower or a piling, looking down to the fractured ground below.

Lukacs explains that his Arbor Vitae paintings are part of a much larger body of work: four different series of paintings linked by the dark, tarry pigments that dominate them. One series shoes silhouetted figures in curtained rooms, one shows images of the full moon, another is exclusively non-figurative.

The works are based on photographs by Soviet artist and firebrand Alexander Rodchenko, whose work caught Lukacs' interest after he saw a retrospective exhibition in New York. Rodchenko pioneered the use of unusual angles and compositional viewpoints - his trademark technique of pointing the camera sharply upwards or downwards and thereby creating a play of diagonal lines is still known as Rodchenko perspective.

Lukacs was so taken by the Rodchenko photographs of trees and winter moons he saw in New York that he borrowed the idea whole cloth. And good magpie that he is, Lukacs shows not an iota of discomfort at the idea of recycling other artists' work. "Let's just say I'm always looking at images," Lukacs admits, grinning. "Then I try to figure out what I can steal, what I can use."

He is clearly proud of Arbor Vitae, as well he might be. It's taken him 15 years, he says, to learn how to control his unorthodox artists' materials - the tar and the varathanes and the roofing cement that give these works so much texture and significance. "now, finally, I can really paint with it," he says.

Back to top

True North Exhibition - 1995

Arbor Vitae Exhibition - 1999