Lucas Moran – Summer Jam 2007

BUIA Gallery is pleased to present From Here on Out, the debut New York solo exhibition of artist Lucas Moran. In vibrant works on canvas, Moran creates an onslaught of energy and emotion pairing more formal abstract painterly gestures with figurative nods to Japanese and American Pop art and graffiti writing. Moran's fusion of high and low painting traditions and his visceral application frame an inquiry into emotion, psyche, and community.

In Summer Jam 2007, Moran offers a glimpse of urban physical and psychological landscape. With a bright yellow decrepit apartment building as a figurative anchor occupying the left of the composition, Moran posits two large-scale graffiti tags floating against a more traditional painterly background and partially obscured by hyper contemporary gestures: drip of lustrous yellow and another of nuclear green paint descend upon the composition and a glowing orb of black seems to be the object of a silhouetted profile's gaze. A sense of decay is evident while a rambunctious, acerbic, positive energy pervades creating a kinetic visual smorgasbord.

Lucas Moran is a New York based artist whose work was featured this past December at the Pulse Art Fair in Miami. He has participated in several group shows in the United States, most recently in Sunny, Clear, and Cool at BUIA. Amongst others, press credits include The New York Times. We are very pleased to announce Lucas Moran's debut New York solo exhibition. — oneartworld.com

Lucas Moran – Untitled 2007

Because of a lot of distractions, only some related to visits to galleries, I'm way behind on a lot of my self-assigned postings, and I've wanted to do at least a quick post about Lucas Moran's show at Buia "From Here On Out", for several weeks now. The artist's small to medium-sized canvases exhibit a mix of tangled shapes and extravagant colors worked, and sometimes alarmingly distressed, in oil and spray paint, here and there including galkyd, and occasionally revealing traces of powdered sandstone.

These paintings broadcast equal elements of chaos and order and remain fundamentally non-pictorial even if they don't leave our imagination to wander totally unattended: Many include both subtle and conspicuous graffiti and pop art components — sometimes both — welcome interlopers which focus Moran's abstraction, dragging us into an exotic, alien world whose gritty seductiveness is intensified by the artist's ability to manipulate the mixed media with such wicked skill. — jameswagner.com

Lucas Moran – Untitled 2007

Splashy spontaneity vies with nerdy control (e.g., outlining splashes) in these large-ish paintings — the untitled one to the left is 76 x 84 inches. The graffiti influence isn't on the surface of the work but in its guts. At times the paintings appear to be the product of group activity — this decentered, authorless quality isn't a flaw but what gives the art its poMo frisson. The air of total random street accident is hard to achieve, and the work vacillates between sense and meaninglessness in a good way. Every inch of every canvas receives some surface consideration mdash; it might be good to see some spaces where absolutely nothing is happening. — tommoody.us