CONSTANTIN LUCACI :

SCULPTURE AS A METAPHOR

OF LIGHT AND ENERGY

At the the root of Constantin   Lucaci's work lie a powerful instinct for plastic art and an extraordinary belief in the potential of humanity and art during the age of technological revolution, space travel, space stations, real and virtual kinetic art, as well as inalterable, indestructible, rustless, resistant and elastic materials.

In the mid 1960s, Lucaci finished his long period of training and his plastic research with traditional materials and techniques (during his apprenticeship he turned his interest to stone, granite and wood, as well as bronze shaping and castings). He won a scholarship to Paris, where he created his first sequence of stainless steel sculptures, an event that yielded ideas for other large and medium size works. These included his "Space and Light" cycle which put him in the spotlight and laid the foundations for his intriguingly complex fountains that were based on electromechanics and powered by running water.

The programme was a necessary tribute to one of Europe's most talented sculptors, whose independent and original style made him on one hand the successor to  Constantin  Brancusi, the father of contemporary sculpture, and on the other an ingenious inventor of shapes linked to space age culture, to perceiving and experiencing spatial-temporal continuity, matter and light, full and empty spaces, and plastic movement. These were not merely poetic, philosophical and conceptual emotions, but an expansion and decisive conquest of the cosmic dimensions of space and time; emotions that were intrinsically linked to this world of new machines and modern private and urban spaces.

In some respects, Lucaci's enchanting moving fountains remind us of the water displays that pervaded the ancient world, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, where music, solid materials, water, movement, light, colors and atmosphere call for the waking of the spirit and the mind, as well as of the creative and active imagination.

Stainless steel is Lucaci's choice material in his search to use his creativity as a form of expression. The spatial and volumetric shapes interact on the mirror-like metal surfaces; he fashions this resistant, compact material that reflects degrees of light whose iridescence varies with the shape's angles, movements, and one's view.

In his search for plastic forms that inhabit, cross and pervade the space, integrating, shaping and mirroring it as they multiply one's perception of its depth and articulation, Lucaci declares his full support for this new world of science and technology and for the fresh momentum     of intellectual and spiritual energy.
Sculptures teem with optimism for the new dawn that came at the end of the fifties and spread throughout the world by the mid sixties (neo-constructivism, kinetic art and optical art, programme art,  new  materials,  new propellants,  space exploration).

The elements that make his work so unique are the material itself (inalterable stainless steel) and the way it surges through the space; the light as it vibrates across the undulating polished surface, the movement, the explicit reference to music, the acoustics, the lightness and the shaping of the space. He designed his sculpture to blend into the urban landscape where art is an organized scheme of electromagnetic and mechanical movements charged with light and sound.

Lucaci's work bears the hallmarks of his search for new monumentality monumentality,  spectacular,  interactive character. This phenomenon was commonly called urban furnishing; however, it placed considerable restrictions on the meaning and values of aesthetic symbols, that became, in my opinion, increasingly necessary to restoring one's sense of belonging to cities, districts, blocks, squares and architecture. Today these structures are considered to be enormous environmental sculptures, worthy of contemplation from a distance, yet alienating at the same time.

A large sculpture and its rhythm, as well as the spaces it activates, restores a sense of participation and becomes an instantly recognizable sign of aesthetic identity. Indeed, it effectively involves and integrates people into society, the individual into a collective, a loner into the community, a private person into public life and existential space into open, free and cosmic space.
Even the smaller works possess and express a monumental energy, a spontaneous and expanding force that stirs physical space, one's gaze, and psychic space: they immediately distract one's attention from the passive perception of space, time, matter and inspire a participatory emotion, a "miracle" whose powerful gestures and deafening echoes stimulate interactive  and  interacting  vibrations  and reverberations.

We have known each other for well over a decade and I must confess that rarely have I found sculpture containing such a direct expression of force and physical, psychic and ethical energy.

When I visited Lucaci at his studio in the artists' quarter, in Bucharest, just a stone's throw from the national television centre (where two of his glistening steel sculptures rise in the yard), I was about twenty meter from his studio when I heard the music that normally accompanies Constantin's work playing at full blast. Sculptures take a long time to make; there are many conceptual stages that include drawing, planning, cutting and working with the material, welding which then has to he made invisible, and finally polishing. But what underlines this procedure is Lucaci's extraordinary mastery of space and material, his breeding of energetic movement rather than volume, tension rather than gravity.
His mastery is so tangible that it is perceptible in the rapid harmony of his preliminary sketches, one moment wide and taut, the next gushing forth in rhythmic spurts that almost seem to grow on top of each other in a dynamic manifestation of Lucaci's passion for musical movement and his flair for the dynamics of ideas and the plastic and elastic mobility of creation. Thus, his works present themselves as metaphors of energy and light that grow and pirouette across the space, illuminating and moulding rather than occupying it.

The brightness of the polished steel enhances the dynamic gesture that seems to blossom as the work grows, ascending towards the sky, the immaterial!, evolving horizontally, as space expands within space by virtue of clever slides and undulations, swelling and tapering, streamlining and concavities. Indeed, the sculptures appear as streams of energy that materialize in the shape of iridescent lights provoked by the constant variation in angles, reverberations and reflections.

Yet, the work is dominated by vertical progress. The material-light rises and then opens into nuclei, which branch into different directions, slide, stutter, deviate and stop, confirming that Lucaci's sculptures are by no means traditional material carvings in which shapes are crafted and modeled by hand; nor are they "constructions" based on rigid geometric or mathematical standards. Instead, they emphasize the energy that bursts from a gesture and the musicality of a sequence of gestures.
Thinking about this carefully, one has a clearer insight into the relationship Lucaci's sculptures have with space, in which sensual allusions to the body stand, cross, animate and disturb, like light that is released, then invigorates.

At this point his sculptures are no longer seen as a twisted silhouette of bodies, but as pure elements that dynamics fly define the space, changing its appearance with the angle of the light, as one moves to another position to look at it from a different perspective. In the fountains, the combined electromechanical movements significantly increase the ability of the spatial fly dynamic plastic objects to blend into the architecture and the environment as if they were moving parts of the entire "show" towards which art leads and architecture is called as it participates wholeheartedly in the exterior space it designs.

Within his large works of urban programme integration as well as in the small and medium sized sculptures of his "Space-Light" sequence lies Lucaci's eagerness to make a valid contribution to the concept of shape in its surroundings; a shape that looks everywhere for its "own space and identifies it in different ways, constantly changing the effect of the light and innovating its relationship with its surroundings.

The only rule is laid down by a personal poetic belief - heightened by an in-depth knowledge of music - that acts upon the sculpture, injecting life into the surroundings  and  transforming  them  into a kaleidoscopic pattern.
The force with which he tames forging, welding, smoothing and polishing the metal, as well as the accuracy of the line required to conquer the space within the work, and the work within the space, imbue the shape and the material with an idea of universal rhythm. Indeed, the introduction of an electromechanical device is proof of a further desire to conquer movement as if it were an expression of life within the cosmos, or the infinite harmonic combinations of energies, materials, streams of light, and dialogue between internal and external spaces.
 

The material is always smooth, refined, polished, shining, and, in a certain sense, "cold" as the nature of metal is such that it never displays any romantic emotion. Despite this, it is animated by the constant iridescence of reflections and markings and colors of the concave and convex shaping of the mirrored surface as they expand and contract. Thoughts materialize in the shape of writhing silhouettes that hew at the space and seem to navigate across ethereal spheres; airy plastic solutions are released into the air where emptiness overshadows fullness and brightness opacity; however any hint of excessive mathematical or geometrical rigidity is eclipsed by bursts of poetic afflatus that stem from raw instinct.

This, however, does not mean that Lucaci lacks a plan: each shape is carefully measured and calibrated, each movement is calculated with a modular ratio according to the volumetric limits of the space; the physical action of the light is studied, sought and invented to inject life into the shape so that it is weightless and charged with energy as it pulsates with perception, imagination and a sense of the fantastic.
For Lucaci, light and movement are expedients vehicles for his endless changes to the object's situation, so that the sculpture is freed from its static condition without adopting Calder's phytomorphic kinetics or Tinguely's      playful, random mechanical combinations, or Niki de Saint Phalle's brightly coloured theatres moved by water.

For a clearer understanding of Constantin tin Lucaci's sculptures, one must remember that he did not set out to represent organic shapes, anthropomorphic allusions or fragments or sections of bodies, but rather an image of movement, dynamic energy that animates the cosmos and links up directly with a technological culture. Indeed, perhaps this energy seeks to lead the technological culture, and its experiences, to a poetic dimension, i.e. it drops the sculpture into the centre of events without removing or estranging it from an overall vision of humanity.

From this point of view, one might say that Lucaci, like many of the kinetic and spatial artists from the sixties onwards, reinterprets and updates both the optimism of the futurists and the neo-constructivist spirit projected into space.

In the same way, beyond the allusions and the metaphors leading to this culture of new materials, technologies, and mathematics lies a lyrical secret that is not built on geometric or topological statements, but on future problems and personal motivations that bring out the hypothetical and poetic side of science.
Herein lie searches into and reflections on hypotheses and the localization of mathematical discourse on the relative and the aleatory, with full freedom to express the infinite possibilities of organizing the material in ways that surpass formulae and rigid scientific shapes.

Lucaci's sculptures offer a poetic explanation of the original, scientific, spatial and technological intuition that, in my opinion, harks back to Brancusi's morphospatial inventions (ultra-dynamic closed shapes of original - ancestral? - purity that relate directly to the space and yet maintain an undeniable organic allusion that is even clearer and more binding in the works of Jean Arp, Henry Moore and Alberto Viani). Lucaci's sculptures also draw inspiration from more recent artists such as Carmelo Cappello and his creative freedom and Alfio Mongelli's spatial problematisation because in Lucaci's work the above concepts are illustrated as pure bursts of complex, articulated and formal energy.

Rather than symbolic, Lucaci's plastic art is a parade of metaphors for the movements of material-light-energy within the space age, our time, our future.

This highly poetic metaphor is awash with magical echoes, rational and "ecstatic" (contemplative) contemplative pleasure in the presence of a planned, formal rigidity (perceptible in all of Lucaci's work, just as one perceives the tight choreography of a dance, in this case the dance of the material-light through the space) that not only builds new spaces that are unexpected, surprising and mobilising, but also invents and fashions surfaces, curves, fuselages, articulated structures and patterns that are visual, mobile, as well as iridescent, dynamic and monumental, at times, like the fountains, even playfully formidable and solemn.

For about forty years, Constantin     Lucaci has been crafting space-light within space. His work lies halfway between the respect for scientific tradition and a desire to provoke a perceptive and conceptual impulse that goes beyond the visible material. His sculpture is not only a declaration of his support for the scientific and spatial ideology of our time, but also an attempt to humanise it, setting  it  somewhere  between  knowledge-consciousness and a free projection of one's imagination towards the future.

It all stems back to the hands of the homo faber, to the artist who does not only invent, but also achieves and maintains a high level of craftsmanship as he fashions the material into durable, effective shapes as if it were an inalienable stage of information, knowledge and a rich, inexhaustible vein of imagination.

Padua, 1999-2001