“Lucy Bull’s landscapes read like tuned-up Impressionism with shades of Mark Bradford. Or maybe late Monet lily pads on acid... [they] hiss and vibrate like Bridget Riley stripes on a hot sidewalk. They dominate the room with ferocious joy.”
Gracefully composed of layers and marks that defy clear structural order, Lucy Bull’s Special Guest from 2019 mesmerizes viewers with a vision reminiscent of a psychedelic experience or a deep dream. The longer one gazes into the work, the more one is lost in the hypnotic trance it induces, as forms emerge from the lush swirls of undefineds lines, or slip away into the kaleidoscopic gradations of magenta and yellow. This disorienting yet serene escape into aesthetics offers a mystical meditation for the senses, a phenomenally immersive experience in a culture saturated with otherwise fleeting images and trends. A highlight of the Los Angeles-based artist’s 2019 solo exhibition at the High Art Gallery in Paris, Special Guest reveals the transcendent brilliance of Bull’s painterly finesse, as the textured patterns and ebullient colors of the painting guide our eye through the ebb and flow of the dreamlike experience that its composition evokes.
“The joy in every successful metamorphosis conforms … with the intellect’s age-old energetic need to liberate itself from the deceptive and boring paradise of fixed memories and to investigate a new, incomparably expansive areas of experience, in which the boundaries between the so-called inner world and the outer world become increasingly blurred and will probably one day disappear entirely.”
Bull’s enigmatic paintings balance the chromatic vibrancy of color field paintings by the likes of Alma Thomas, Helen Frankenthaler, or Sam Gilliam with gestural markings that recall the Surrealist landscapes of Max Ernst, who developed the technique of grattage to record the grain of textured objects between layers of paint. Embodying the fundamental Surrealist interest in unlocking new subconscious potentialities, Bull’s ethereal paintings stimulate a delicate wavering between conscious and unconscious thought in the viewer. This visceral experience offers a mirror into Bull’s own process, which balances both calculation and impulse as the artist works to tease out fragments of forms from the abstract layers of her loose brushwork. In the artist’s own words, “I want to titillate the senses. I want to draw people closer. I think people aren’t used to paying much prolonged attention to paintings on walls, and I want to allow people to have more of a sensory experience. I want to draw them in so that there is the opportunity for things to open up and for them to wander.” (The artist in conversation with Ophelia Sanderson, “Getting Lost in the Enigmatic Paintings of Lucy Bull,” Whitewall Magazine, 18 November 2021 (online)) In Special Guest, the artist continues to engage the medium of painting as both choreography of and experimentation with the ineffable possibilities of synesthetic perception, using her sublime fluency in color and texture to play gentle tricks on our eye, and with it, our mind.
