 |
|
Reserved Filled with Esthetic Energy: The Art of Michael Lasuchin
In the presence of Michael Lasuchin’s extraordinary artworks, I find myself touched by a sense of sublime serenity. Even though my feet touch the floor, my nerve endings send me soaring, even higher, into a world of limitless metaphysical space where I am in contact with feelings of elevated tranquility and transcendent equilibrium. This is because his forms speak with exceptional brilliance in a grammar and vocabulary given meaning by the language of vision.
It is little less that five years from the day when he suffered pulmonary arrest and passed on to next dimension. He was 83 years of age and is survived by his wife, Dorothy Roschen Lasuchin and his brother, Victor Lasuchin. Since that day, the drift of time has provided an excellent perspective for carefully examining his oeuvre. Without question, a lifetime of significant expressive accomplishments reveal him to have been a remarkably distinguished member of the international art community. By virtue of the numerous awards his work has received and because of many institutions and private individuals that have examples of his art in their permanent collections, his highly esteemed reputation is recognized far and wide.To this day he continues to be admired for creating constellations of form that are free any and all non-essentials. Like the great architect, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, his mature idiom was always a perfect example of the age-old, honored wisdom, summed up in the expression, “Less is more.” In common with some of the most important figures in the early modern art scene, Michael Lasuchin was born in Russia apparently, there were factors in both the characters of his native land and his unique upbringing that nourished an inborn talent and post-natal potential for becoming an exceptionally gifted and widely respected artist. Before the onset of World War II, he studied art in Russia. After the war and capture by the German army, he lived for some years as a displaced person in Germany. Eventually, he was able to leave Europe and come to America where he settled in Philadelphia. While living there, he earned degrees in the fine arts from the Philadelphia College of Art (now, the University of the Arts) and the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. In time he was invited to teach at his alma mater, the University of the Arts, where he spent many years as a professor on their instructional staff. His stimulating influence on the students who studied with him was considerable. Examining Michael Lasuchin’s art with patience and concentration, you encounter what may feel, at first glance, like a void. However, as if by magic, the seemingly empty fields of vision take on a rare, non-materialistic sense of extraordinary esthetic fullness. On a verbal level, this may seem like a contradiction in terms. Nevertheless, viewers able to achieve rapport with his distinctive language of design, gradually find themselves making contact with exceptional variety of optical dynamics. It is an equivalent of what many visitors experience when they are in touch with such timeless architectural masterworks as Stonhenge in Englandand the mighty stained glass windows that brings the chromatic brilliance oflight into the massive Gothic cathedrals of medieval France, Spain and Germany. In many ways his artworks also invoke feelings and insights that come alive when you listen brilliantly original, serious music of the past and the present. Similar to the impact cast by such examples of heroic expression from the areas of art and music, on another layer of perception, his achievements also provide an atmosphere and a mood that are hauntingly silent and incredibly subtle. The more they are studied in close contact with his actual works of art and the more they are compared with artworks by other people, the more they grow in stature before your very eyes. Besides making rewarding comparisons the Michael Lasuchin’s work and the accomplishments of his contemporaries, a connoisseur may also find interesting precedence for his mature creative vision among the breakthroughs of the early and late cubists and the work of the courageous pioneers of pure plastic form. They were all committed to questioning the nature and the limitations of their craft. Each of them invented new ways of expression, liberated from outworn modes of representation in paint. Instead of replicating what had come before, they proceeded to reshape their expressive means. With bold daring, they injected vital, new life into forms that had lost their cutting edges through the dulling effects of dreary redundancy. Early on, Michael Lasuchin replaced obvious verisimilitude, borrowed from yesteryear, with images manifesting an esthetic reality of their own. He dismissed the notion that art must imitate the overt appearance of nature. Instead, he insisted on making forms based upon a transformation of his perceptions into soundly realized images that neither compromised the truth of the two dimensional surface nor the rectangular format of an enclosing frame of reference. In magnificently poetic black and white compositions, he gave credible expression of erotic subject matter. Hi did this by combining sprayed areas of subtle shading in black and white tones with abstract suggestions of gentle tenderness. These forms were augmented further by curved shapes rich with tactile delicacy. Their elusive charm and sound compositional resolution are memorable tributes to his fanciful flights of imagination and infinite depth of independent graphic expression. Moving ever forward and employing a mind and method entirely his own, Michael Lasuchin fastened onto the use of plane geometric shapes in varied configurations of tone, texture and color. Extending an amazingly open character, they invite spectators to enter and explore the dynamic life they both unfold and reveal. The watercolor titled Present, from 1974, offers a provocative interplay of flat shapes in black, white, vermillion, green and gray that assemble themselves with each other to become a cube shape and then, suddenly, revert to their original flat character. The shifting nature of the color planes lends an exciting sense of nomination to the otherwise, seemingly stable character of the overall complex. Transfiguration, from 1980 is a fascinating watercolor on a Formica surface which has been laminated to a wooden base. The composition is made up of a series of flat multicolored geometric shapes in the center, with a pair of plain, rectangular forms on either side that are graduated from deep blue to white. Here again, the movement of the colors, vibrating with a distinctive intensity, adds up to an engaging optical experience. It really has to bee seen with your own eyes in order to be fully and properly appreciated. In addition, there is a smaller version of this theme, from 1988, rendered as a digital print. In both versions, the composition is truly a deeply rewarding sight to behold. Perhaps Michael Lasuchin’s ultimate triumph consisted of profoundly expressive artworks given shape in a surprising variety of media, all handled in perfectly painted or screen printed areas that always meet each other with rigorous perfection. Unfailingly, color is applied with impeccable precision. I am convinced no other individual working in the fine arts during the last two centuries has ever handled an airbrush for sprayed applications of watercolor as superbly as Lasuchin. They are virtuosic displays of painstaking craftsmanship, executed with dazzling elan. By the same token, his strokes of oil crayon and graphite touched to the surface of Formica are executed with the decisive precision of a gifted diamond cutter’s hummer and chisel, at work in a gem-crafting studio. Incidentally, the expert artisanship thus demonstrated is not merely evidence of a facile end in itself. Instead, the fastidious pursuit of excellence that it presents is an intrinsic part of the reach for a utopian reality that is at the heart of his expressive purpose. Furthermore, beyond being magnificent examples of artistic execution, the works of Michael Lasuchin are absolutely alive with dramatic impact, disciplined intensity and esthetic brevity. While his art comes to terms with sincere considerations of humanistic necessity, Michael Lasuchin’s body of form steers clear of either preconceived dogma or institutionalized arrogance. Instead, they are in inquiries into, and illuminations of, deeply experienced states of being, presented from a sublime perspective. Manifesting an exceptional degree of nonconformist determination, his vision speaks in concise terms of shape and color to affirmations of eternal esthetic wonder. With marvelous variation and remarkable creative gusto, they explore zones of human perceptual awareness with sincere regard for the role played by optical sensitivity in the universal pursuit of the life good to live. Burton Wasserman Emeritus Professor of Art Rowan University Glassboro, New Jersey |