Reflections on the Art of Yanick Lapuh

 

            French-born, Boston-based artist Yanick Lapuh meditates on the dualities of concrete and illusory worlds through intricately designed and conceptually rich painted constructions.  Equally at home with abstract geometric configurations which play with the modernist concept of flatness and three-dimensionality as well as with allusive biomorphic surreal forms, Lapuh explores existential questions of being and non-being, in his multi-faceted panel paintings.  Formally, a devotion to sculptural construction gracefully merges with an intense passion for paint.

             I first came into contact with Lapuh’s evocative painted objects in 1989 when he was a Fifth year student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. His Untitled (Manhole), 1989, a mixed media on canvas wood triptych suggesting the form and materials of manhole covers, was my selection as a featured work in an important juried show at the school.  In this already mature work, an abstracted manhole cover, sliced in half in the left panel and magnified into pentagonal forms in the right panel, is juxtaposed with a thin central panel of black and white rectangles. Although formally working towards a minimalist aesthetic, the manhole series was ripe with personal and psychological associations.  Lapuh’s smoky tones and rough textures recall the gray stone and sooty factories of Longwy, France-- the large mill town where the artist spent part of his childhood amongst the black smoke of steel plants.  Symbolically for Lapuh, the manholes “were doors to underground tunnels, unseen from the outside and yet the intricate designs on the cover mirrored the tangle of tunnels below.”

            A more refined formalism characterized the ten abstract diptych panels at Lapuh’s debut solo show at Alpha Gallery, Boston in 1990.  A greater sense of sculptural 3-dimensionality also developed in his mating of contrasting muted colors, square and polygonal shapes. Strips of wood began to protrude from the surface as in SZ7, 1990, where an ochre and green rectangle is joined to a larger black cube. The rectangle is bisected and further segmented by separate wood strips attached with gesso and nails. In many of the works, hard-edged contours were contrasted with well placed painterly splashes of color.  As I stated in my Artforum review of the 1990 Alpha Gallery show, “Though Brice Marden’s monochromatic fields of beeswax and Frank Stella’s early aluminum shaped canvases come to mind, Lapuh is more concerned with the dialogue between the spontaneity of action painting and the stability of primary forms than he is with furthering the tradition of Minimal painting.” His beautifully constructed painted works elaborated on essential rectangular and trapezoidal forms, in ways that played with real and perceived dimensions According to Lapuh:

 

 

             For Lapuh, geometry has never been committed to logic. After 1992, the artist began to feel a need to get out of his own “staid logic to a freer, more unpredictable direction.” Indeed, he had evolved from a figurative surrealist in the late 1970s, to an abstract geometrist after graduation from the Museum School.  By his third solo Boston exhibition in 1995 at Howard Yezerski Gallery, Lapuh adopted a more free-form abstract language evocative of the visionary biomorphic work of Joan Miro, and the cartoonish, loopy shaped canvases of Elizabeth Murray.  Lapuh expanded his repertoire of shapes to include ovals, ellipses and curves which gave animated organic energy to his structural dynamics in works like the large scale One Bird, One Stone, 1995.  An egg-shaped form appears suspended from a tightly rendered linear framework that opens onto two pairs of protruding curved and patterned dancing appendages; the tips are left spattered and raw in homage to inconclusiveness and painterly process. A darker realm is explored in The Enemy Within, 1994, where a central distorted trapezoidal form is marked with incisions that create a deep cavity of corners. The striped colored patterns near the tips of flailing appendages are charred by the darkness emanating from the abyss. This work is reminiscent of Lapuh’s earlier cubic prisons, whose corners developed as a point of focus for the artist’s thoughts:

 

       

     After three solo shows, Lapuh decided that he needed to rethink his personal and artistic directions. In 1996, he returned to France with his wife and two children, this time to the southwestern region near Toulouse.  Away from his Boston studio, he made numerous journal entries and photographs as he toured Switzerland, Germany, England and Spain. He also became intensely interested in Tibetan Buddhism, which recognizes that the discomforts and frustrations of normal human existence can be eliminated by recognizing the constant mutability of reality and detaching from it. Lapuh also took particular interest in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, an esoteric text believed to have been written in the 8^th century as a guide for the dying to help them recognize the nature of their mind and attain liberation from the cycle of rebirth. Most interesting to Lapuh were the Tibetan Buddhist ideas of  “impermanence, constant change, cause and effect and the illusion of what we perceive to be reality.”           

            When he returned to the United States and to his home in Boston in 1998, Lapuh decided that the best way for him to observe and transform reality was by making art.  His new creations were enhanced with the brilliant crimsons, saffrons and oranges of Tibetan ceremonial art and the centers took on greater significance as the sculptural elements moved toward the edges. In  Heaven And Earth, 1998, flames emerge from an oval hole, as if  Lapuh's  earlier manhole cover has opened up to unleash the fiery force of the fierce deities, one encounters on the road toward enlightenment.  The Flame, 1998,  expresses the vitality of spirituality in the deep orange fiery forms painted at the center of a cloud-like shaped canvas. The ominous recesses and dangling appendages of The Enemy Within are exchanged for incandescent energy and softer cloudlike edges.  Strong colors and linear elements now create the visual dynamics on smooth flat surfaces.

             Back home in a large basement woodworking workshop and painting studio, Lapuh used his  jig-saws and band-saws to carve out plywood supports based on personal explorations of the Mandala, traditionally a symmetrical harmonious representation of the enlightened mind used as aids to meditation. Lapuh’s Mandala, 2001, is instead uneven, spiked, and pulsating with anxious energy. The central orange painted form has evolved from a flame to an embryo with an umbilical cord attached to a thorny exterior and grounded on a black emblematic medallion.

            For Lapuh, the process of artistic creation is often labyrinthine with lots of dead ends, “but nothing is ever lost, the dialogue resumes later with new associations that come and go over time, grafting themselves onto newly discovered forms and shapes.”  As the artist explored new ways to enlarge his artistic vocabulary, the challenge was always between restraint and letting go, solid and open spaces, free-form and hard-edge. In 1999, Lapuh began to obsessively collect all kinds of cardboard boxes, in order to study how they could be deconstructed and reconstructed in wood. After many false starts, he arrived at the orange and green high relief Yes Willingly, 2002.  In this work, it appears that here an imaginary pastry box has been extended, opened up and its ends have been refolded into complex forms.  The boxes helped Lapuh to begin to re- introduce three dimensionality into his work.

            Shine in Sweetly, 2004 was a seminal work for the artist who after 2002 had abandoned flat-surfaced irregularly shaped paintings for rectilinear ones. “But,” explains Lapuh, “the need for the tactile was too strong—without actual 3-dimensionality  something was missing.” In Shine in Sweetly, Lapuh concentrated on carving out a series of “Y”-shaped decagons within the interior of the rectangular base.  The illusion of 27 partial cubed green, blue and red forms outlined with yellow corners was created by painting and edging the repeating opposing angular forms.  “This intermixing of images excited me,” recalls Lapuh.  Enduring Duality, 2004, was the first painting where the artist felt that he had successfully superimposed two images on a 3-D format.  Here, carefully crafted cut-out wood equilateral triangles and right angles placed in opposite directions are juxtaposed in five ascending rows on a separate flat rectangular plane. Various intricate geometric patterns are also carved into the triangular forms so that the colored shapes appear to open and close with implied movement.  This is also true in Just Around the Corner, 2004, where the triangles are more uniformly painted and constructed; the effect on one level is of a succession of variously opening and closing Origami fortune tellers, commonly called “cootie catchers.”  Our Very Survival, 2005, is almost kinetic in its combinations of a relief infrastructure and a carefully painted blue lattice of triangles set over green and maroon triangles that form an Escher-like staircase within the work.

            Once he had remastered the precision of hard-angled corners and hexagons, Lapuh soon began to break the sameness of pure geometrical surfaces by adding overlaid wooden fluid curved shapes like the central wavelike form in The Challenge of Distraction, 2004.  Varying views of concentric portions of painted green, yellow and white ovals are enclosed within rectangles on the flat surfaces of the two side panels

of the triptych Back into the Light, 2005.  The sculptural forms are moved to the central red and yellow panel where carved triangles are superimposed with yellow hexagons. Again, Lapuh turns against formula by not filling in the lower area of the central panel with paint, allowing drips and mark making to show through. Various levels of relief,the corner, hexagons and incomplete passages of purple paint are combined in To Go On, 2005.  These subtle sculptural acrobatics suggest an urge to re-engage the entire painting exercise with literal 3-dimensionality.

            Recently, Lapuh has decided to embrace openness and show the evolution of each succeeding stage of his process.  Lapuh has begun to cut away at the upper level of his constructions to reveal the lattice infrastructure below as in Solitary Refinement, 2006.    The dialogue between the magenta, yellow and green triangles is interrupted by irregularly shaped biomorphic cut-outs that expose a skeletal structure of more plywood triangles below.  “Perhaps, it’s a question of revealing ‘l’envers du décor’ (behind the scenes) to lift the apparent layers one by one to see what’s hidden behind,” suggests Lapuh.

              Illusions dissolve one by one to reveal others as  Lapuh creates new marriages of forms, and seeks  new visual ‘words’ to enlarge his vocabulary, “The interesting thing in these meanderings,” concludes Lapuh, “is the element of surprise, of not having control over the discoveries to come.”

 

Francine Koslow Miller, PhD, May 12, 2006

 

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