The Brooklyn Rail

Emil Lukas’s fifth solo exhibition at Sperone Westwater presents the viewer with two floors of shape-shifting optical structures that unsettle the relation between seeing and knowing. Pacing around the works, perplexed by the dizzying sights before me, I was made acutely aware of the embodied nature of vision—the physiological orchestration of light, retina, eye muscles, and nerve signals, all subject to interference and failure. To regain stability I stood back from the display, and, satisfyingly, fragments cohered once again into atmospheric images that evoked cosmic forms and landscapes.

For over a decade, the Stockertown, Pennsylvania-based artist has been quietly making works that thematize the mechanics of vision and light. At Sperone Westwater the main gallery showcases his latest invention, “lattice paintings,” which involve layering a composition painted on a wooden panel with raised dots over an underpainting on canvas. This precise procedure counterintuitively blurs both compositions, resulting in a foggy view of tree branches (Glass in Moving Water [2024]) or a blinding vision of a star-strewn sky (Burn 2292 [2025]). The moiré pattern (which also undergirds his earlier “bubble wrap paintings”) conceals the nature of these works as “paintings,” giving them the look of perforated metal sheets or large screen prints. Yet if artists from the 1960s like Roy Lichtenstein and Alain Jacquet incorporated this mechanical structure to emphasize flatness—a symptom of the postmodern loss of affect—Lukas affirms the creative power of human vision and the artist’s hand. The wooden patches superimposed on abstract backgrounds paradoxically create a sense of infinite expansion into and beyond the frame, forming paintings that are equally sculptural, tactile constructions and pixelated captures of unknown terrains.

The physicality of Lukas’s lattice works is most apparent when they are approached from an oblique angle. Similarly, the two “thread paintings” in the east gallery hover over the walls like glowing planetary discs, pulling me towards their centers. This series, Lukas’s best known, dates back to when he first began manipulating threads as if they were fluid paints nearly two decades ago. Starting with wooden boxes as support, he has now moved to dome-shaped reflectors, which provide depth and nuance the light. Thousands of threads are fixed on nails along the edges of a reflector and are then stretched across its cross-section in a methodical and meditative process. The accumulation of threads engenders an endlessly variegated surface by virtue of the colors’ mutual displacements, interactions, and amplifications—a phenomenon reminiscent of the scintillating iridescence of rippling waters.

The inner shell of the reflectors has been painted white, and in Fuse (2024), Lukas has further drawn shapes along the edges that evoke rock formations. This mysterious artifact seems to contain the entire universe: staring into the nucleus, its volume appears to expand. The threads travel across my eyesight, weaving and undoing themselves in time. I cannot look away—the work seems to absorb time itself. Stepping back, the warm radiance of the core darkens while the outer rim emits a golden halo, as if I was staring at an extraterrestrial planet.

Lukas’s thread paintings have often been compared to the mesmerizing effect of James Turrell’s “Skyspaces”. But while Turrell works negatively by puncturing existing architectural structures to inspire new perceptions of nature, Lukas creates interactive ocular objects that exercise and enrapture the eyes, deconstructing the perceiving act itself. Achieving an understated illusion via an exacting process is at the heart of Lukas’s practice. His technique is so refined that the hand cancels itself out, tacitly erasing every mark as it is being made. The effect is not verisimilitude but self-conscious artifice: what you see is not what you see. In Michael Fried’s famous terms, this is an experience not of absorption but of the theatrical. One finds oneself looking.

If the works installed on the gallery’s first floor rely on transposition and composition to trick the eye, the series lining the second-floor mezzanine takes inversion and transformation as its themes. What at first resemble wet plate negatives of Romantic landscapes are, in fact, paintings made collaboratively between the artist and his larvae. These “larvae paintings” originated from an unlikely encounter in the late eighties in Lukas’s Harlem studio: regretting that he killed a fly, he kept it in a puddle of paint. The surviving larvae crawled out of the body, leaving traces of technicolor rings. Since then, Lukas has been breeding maggots in his studio and “collaborating” with them by creating conditions of light, temperature, and humidity to direct their movement. As part of this partnership, Lukas respects the flies’ life cycle, meaning that he can only make these works from late summer to early fall. Here, between the layers of larvae marks, the artist added hand-drawn imagery of a flying plane (Mendelson in Kipling’s Error [2024]), a lone boat (Clarence Martin and the USS Hugh L Scott [2024]), or a moment of impact (4.24 Light Years [2024]), creating pictures that aspire to the grandeur of history paintings. The entropic lines made by his nonhuman collaborators are integral to the compositions and add to their effect, a kind of Beuysian sublime. That said, the analogy between these works and photography is more than superficial: Lukas has turned paper into an “event field” that, within each frame, withholds and fixes time in its unfolding.

Lukas hopes that the viewer’s process of reception and perception will exceed that of the works’ making. In this aim, the show is successful. But as a result his works cannot, perhaps, be photographed without altering them altogether. For contemporary eyes accustomed to the desensitizing screen, Lukas’s art could be challenging but also necessarily therapeutic.