Unreal Humanity Reality

INTRODUCTION BY M. MOJANA / PREFACE BY L. FACCO | 2010 (translated from Italian) ⸻ LUCAS RACASSE’S PRE-POP Marina Mojana – Artistic Director of the Campari Gallery “What does Racasse show us? A pulp world, straight out of a Quentin Tarantino film — soaked in violence, sex, blood, and the undead. In this world, the distortion of the human figure is not an expression of fragility or tenderness, but something base, even crude. His protagonists are friends, or celebrities from the star system: musicians, actors, but also politicians and dictators. Racasse photographs and paints them, then rephotographs, deconstructs or tears them apart — inserting them into a grotesque, hallucinatory scene, rendered in acidic colors, where time and space have lost all meaning. Rodin’s statues, Bosch’s damned, Ensor’s skulls cross paths with his characters. Everything plays out without depth, as if on a screen — an eternal, brightly colored, desperate present. Those who blur distinctions sow confusion. Those who sell lies are accomplices to murder. This is the cry of protest the artist lodges in the confined space of his works: parodies of the present, caricatures of an upside-down world where murderers sign autographs and good girls go everywhere but to heaven. At first glance, his works shock — they hit like a punch in the stomach. And that’s exactly what Racasse — who calls himself a serial illustrator, a lunatic, a troublemaker, a subversive — wants: to give visual form to the hell of the 21st century. His is a personal, obsessive battle against the world of advertising and mass media — the very world that once nourished him, fascinated him, shaped him, even artistically. He doesn’t like to mention it, but his father was an executive at Saatchi & Saatchi. Lucas Racasse is a pseudonym — the alias of a young Frenchman who uses his talent to wage this daily war. His work is a cry in the wilderness, a reminder that art is not mere entertainment — not even cultural entertainment. A work of art is not a machine with internal mechanisms, like a refrigerator — it has a soul. And when we look closely at Racasse’s pieces, we feel it: a deep nostalgia for something beautiful, something good — something worth living for, and worth becoming an artist to defend.”