Pratik : PRATIK'S CURRENT ISSUE SPECIAL: MARIÁN PAUER ON LUKA BRASE’S ART

MARIÁN PAUER

Wings of his Heart

A Review of Luka Brase’s Art

One day, LUKA BRASE took a deep breath and knocked firmly on the door of the secret chamber. The squeaking door revealed hidden dreams and airships, unfulfilled loves and desires for beauty, wings of butterflies and rainfalls, which had not yet fallen, but were about to descend. ... He entered the room where people go to dream with their eyes wide open and so did a career of devotion and growth begin.

When Luka paints his dreams, a confident line crosses the canvas and pulsates in the rhythm of his heartbeat. In a moment, the line climbs up steeply, then rushes down into a free fall, changes its course and turns right only to twirl left the next second. One line replaces the other, but neither of them drowns in the sea of the drawing. There is always enough space for both the rural landscape and the skyscrapers of the big city, for a sense of belonging and loneliness. Figures dance, spinning their daily wheel of fortune, which sometimes creaks, and it might even break, but once it is repaired, it will again embark on its endless quest through the cradle to the cross. You can either join that enchanting dance, or just watch from aside, listen in silent astonishment and follow the painter’s hand. The hand of a creator who cannot contain everything within his own being, who must share himself, to the last piece of his substance. He carries an endless number of paintings inside him and he can only ease the eternal unrest within by ceaseless work. For Luka, canvas, line, color, shape – they create a world in which he can tell his truth, be himself. For art is formed as love: always pushed to its limit, without relying on someone else’s help.

On the last pages of his previous book – LUKA BRASE Art on The Way Vol. 2 – Luka described himself, as a storyteller born as “a point in a line”, as “a drawing child…”

In Amsterdam, after visiting the van Gogh Museum, I kept in mind, that the Dutch painter was as well an all-time passenger on the way to station NOWHERE. Subconsciously, I have made a parallel with the eternal traveler Luka, but with a significant difference - on his journeys, he knows exactly where he is going and why he chooses the main streams, not the side paths. There haven’t actually been any sideways on his routes so far. So how to better characterize this eternally traveling artist? I wanted to write a painter, but he is also a glassmaker, or more precisely a painter painting on glass, and a photographer who enters photographs without knocking. He confidently paints his visions on acts of young women or lets two little birds fly into a snapshot of New York buzzing with people to remind the big city of nature’s delicateness. He strives to become one with light and paints it on evening silhouettes of buildings. He stores his dreams in tapestries, so that he can then enchant and light up the walls that build a home.

Music plays from the core of Luka’s paintings. With incredible ease, he sways with details inside his pictures. He loves the freedom of the canvas and encapsulates it with the precision of a watchmaker. All one has to do is watch and listen carefully. Through thy heart.

When you are looking at Luka Brase’s images through your heart, maybe one of the rainfalls, which had not yet fallen, will begin to descend. He may also wipe clear the dreams and unfulfilled desires, which have been covered in the dust of oblivion over time. Maybe a stream of further feelings and ideas will run through your mind. Maybe ...

To add a quote from Luka’s verses: ... “me a drawing child ... / awakening, discovering… liveliness / stories of love and hate / sadness and happiness / day and night / anywhere ... anytime / storyline through my eyes / into my hands / drawings ... wings of my heart / creating visual diaries: / The world in frames of my soul.”

Storyteller. A point in a line. Drawing child. An adult man who can still look at the world through a child’s eyes. Pure and undistorted. He dreams the dreams of beauty, of the infinite universe of the human soul. Our precious friend Dejan Mansfeld-Rupnik perfectly illustrates it when he quotes the worldly renowned artist Paul Klee: “A drawing is simply a line going for a walk” and adds that if you have grown up in the mountains, like Luka has in his beloved region of Orava near Dolný Kubín, you know for sure that going for a walk can also result in taking a long journey. And whenever Luka sees that artistic line, which has departed on an incredible journey through the fullness of life and love, it leaves him in silent amazement.

Nothing better and more beautiful is there left to be said and written. And so, I end here, because only Luka Brase himself can outdo his work by entering the secret chamber again. Carried by the wings of his heart towards an infinity of images.

Translated and edited by Zuzka Labska and Stefani Draganova

Luka Brase was born in 1983 in Czechoslovakia. He studied art at the Academy of Arts in Slovakia.

He has done 30 solo exhibitions in Norway, Belgium, Netherlands, Austria, Germany, Ireland, Slovakia, United Kingdom, Hungary, Switzerland, Czech Republic, USA – New York, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, China – Shanghai and Beijing. 18 group participations in the Netherlands, Austria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Ireland, France among them important show in Künstlerhaus Wien, Afordable art fair Amsterdam, Accessible art fair Bratislava and Cite Internationale Des Arts in Paris.

His art is a part of the permanent collection in the Museum of Art – SUPEC Shanghai, China. His works belong to private collections in many countries in the world. He is the founder of project Art on the way and represented by DE Galerie in Den Haag, Netherlands and Artgogo gallery in Shanghai, China.

Luka Brase works and lives across Europe.

Marián Pauer /75/ has devoted more than four decades to professional photography as a historian, a theorist, and author of 31 publications, a curator of many exhibitions and a member of juries for international exhibitions and salons in Slovakia and abroad. He is author of several monographs, screenplays for television documentaries and radio shows.

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