A moment of presence - A moment of pretenceCatalogue essay
2025
This text can be found Blush on a wrinkled cheeck, a book on and around the work of Lukas Thaler.
Here a link to the book.
“Lukas Thaler is methodical, precise, and dedicated, and I think he could be a successful pâtissier. “Recipe” is a word that he often employs to describe his working process. As he once explained to me, each finished group of works—“families” as he calls them—sits on top of countless botched experiments. Most of what he produces usually ends up in the bin as he searches for the right formula to get his desired effect. With but a handful of ingredients—resin, marble sand, and aluminum—Thaler crafts a rich variety of textures. I like to picture Lukas in his studio, standing in front of a steaming cauldron, breathing life into the mineral bodies of his works like a witch. Be it black magic or culinary expertise, there is no denying that his objects cast a spell on the viewers, their luminous colors and playful titles drawing us closer like moths.
A kind of playfulness runs through much of Thaler’s work—something that tickles our sense of wonder and pulls us in. Faced with his carefully crafted mirages of vitality, movement, and organicity, we are taken back to that infant stage of worldly discovery: I want to touch it, I want to put it in my mouth, I want to know what it feels like. The ambiguity of the objects’ material production adds to their charm. Their skins display a kind of untouched quality, even when traces of their making are deliberately left visible. The surfaces of Thaler’s Touchy-feely paintings, for instance, are covered with marks of the artist’s fingers running through the paint like a child’s impressions on a sandpit. Even then, the naive look is not random, but studied—part of Thaler’s broader work of pretense.
As Dan Fox points out in Pretentiousness: Why it Matters, artists have a privileged relationship with pretense. While it is frowned upon in the real world, it is socially sanctioned on stage, canvas, screen. Thaler’s work is built heavily on it. Despite our first impressions, the wooden bark on the wall is no tree. His Soluble Subjects are not going to melt down to the floor. The rock-shaped speakers in the corner are not actual stones. Still, playing along can be a way to access deeper knowledge: “Pretending is what kids do to figure out the world.” Thaler sets the stage for his illusion to take place. It is up to the viewers to suspend their disbelief and let the actors fool them.
The metaphor is not accidental. Thaler’s objects perform a carefully curated choreography. To sell their tricks convincingly, they need to catch the attention of their audience. The viewer is constantly addressed through a number of strategies. Take, for example, the series of found cat sculptures titled viewers (2022). Lukas collects these ceramic pets with a clear preference for cheap and vaguely modeled specimens, closer in appearance to the memory of cats than to those of flesh and blood. A gentle smile plays across one of the animals’ faces, another seems bored. With their muzzles raised, looking around, Thaler arranges them so that their eyes act as guiding arrows through the exhibition space. The silent exchange of glances between the statues can feel, at times, inclusive and, at times, exclusive—how very feline. What’s certain is that their eyes make us conscious of our own gaze while, at the same time, revealing that other gazes are at play.
Once you realize you are being watched, you may notice that voyeurism is a recurring motif in Thaler’s generally abstract-oriented compositions. If you filled a room with his work, you would probably feel the sensation of walls staring at you. Walking around would be playing peekaboo with the furniture. His pastel-colored Stool series is constellated with faces, as are his Spheres. In one of these, the phrase “more than meets the eye,” also the piece’s title, circles on the coin-shaped plaster base, framing a sketched face with a double set of eyes. Letters and facial features resemble wobbly spaghetti resting on a plate—a forkful away from indeterminacy. Another example is found in one of his Soluble subjects, whose surface has been laser-engraved with a smiley face composed of the artist’s own name (LUKAS)—quite the cheeky self-portrait. I am reminded of those Renaissance paintings where the author, alone in a crowd of figures, stares straight at the viewer, like Raphael amongst the philosophers in The School of Athens. These are early examples of breaking through the fourth wall, metatheatrical acts that draw attention to the make-believe nature of the images. At the same time, by addressing us directly, they draw us into the scene, the separation between real and fictional space, spectator and performer—or, in Thaler’s case, observing subject and observed object—growing thinner.
I am reminded of what Jacques Lacan described as “gaze”: the uneasy sensation of the thing we watch reciprocating our look. Once that happens, we might start doubting the given, traditional, hierarchical distinction that assigns agency to subjects and passivity to objects. Ultimately, Thaler’s crafted actors always exist on the verge of plunging back into pure, abstract matter. I’m reminded of the first time I met Thaler’s Soluble subjects hanging on a gallery’s white wall, neatly arranged on their rectangular aluminum frames. Their textures seemed to pendulate along a spectrum of recognizability. Some I could immediately name, such as the folds of a sheet, tree bark, stone. Others, drippy and bright, resisted classification. I clearly remember my eyes moving from one surface to the other—looking for forms I could identify—and my growing unease when faced with what appeared to me as wounded skin and undefined bodily fluids oozing down the canvas. Adjacent, one of the subjects had been laser-engraved with the drawing of a cloud, eyes closed, mouth blowing a cartoonish wind—Farbspucker, “color spitter.” Wind, spit, paint, blood. As my mind strolled down this unexpected metaphoric chain, I started to feel a little dizzy.
Vision, in Thaler’s world of oozing illusions, is always a bodily experience. We are not left untouched by what we see. The conflation between sight and touch, inside and outside, subject and object, finds a symbolic totem in a work from his 2020 series A Disguised Form of an Old Toad, which focused on a selection of yokai, demons from Japanese folklore. One of these is the dōnotsura, a mischievous trickster recognizable by the absence of its head, its facial features having migrated down to its torso (eyes on nipples, mouth running horizontally along the belly). In Thaler’s depiction, the figure’s body is barely sketched, and in the center of its chest lies a rectangular area made of plaster, like a small canvas within a canvas. Pollock-esque splashes and drips protrude from its surface in relief. These white, organic forms resemble semen or intestines rather than facial features, an association reinforced by their placement on the monster’s belly. A conceptual slippage between vision and digestion occurs inside the mineral guts of the dōnotsura as we witness the spectacle of identity dissolving into matter.
The appearance of a ghost is often associated with the return of something that is forgotten or repressed—a visual lapsus in the texture of reality. Thaler’s dōnotsura acts as a warning figure: look too closely and you may lose yourself. I think of Jean-Paul Sartre’s le visqueux (viscous entity)—introduced in Being and Nothingness (1943)—a state of matter that is neither liquid nor solid, but somewhere in the middle, like honey. If I were to put my hand in a jar filled with it: “long columns falling off my fingers suggest my own substance flowing into the pool of stickiness. Plunging into the water gives a different impression. I remain solid, but to touch stickiness is to risk diluting myself into viscosity.” Le visqueux is restless, unusable. It doesn’t comply with our expectations, but sticks rebelliously to the hand that touches it. Sartre sees in it the agency of matter itself. As such, he considers it a corruptive force for the Self, a danger to the subject’s autonomy.
“Now how easily and quickly these images are created, and how unceasingly they flow from things and slip off and depart”: this is how Lucretius, that ancient proponent of a metamorphic, cosmic materialism, described pareidolia, the phenomenon—characteristic of reverie-like, altered states of mind—in which we project coherent and meaningful patterns in response to (recognizably) random sensations, such as clouds that look like animals or food that resembles Jesus. Pareidolia abounds in Thaler’s theater: tree-lamps lie on the floor, mineral surfaces ooze semen-like blood, ceramic cats turn their heads, hiding their secrets. We gaze and we are gazed upon. Vision liquefies and, as the universe becomes a mirror, the dividing line between Self and world gently blurs. Experiencing Thaler’s works can have a viscous, sticky effect, and yet it’s up to the viewer whether or not to indulge in the buffet he has prepared for us. “A moment of presence,” states the artist in one of his Slices. A moment of pretense, I might add.”