#OurWorld

INTRODUCTION 'Series & Portraits' | XAVIER LÖWENTHAL | Author & Publisher (La 5e Couche) | 2021 — Lucas Racasse's series and portraits partake of a baroque aesthetic that could be described as 'bumper car' ('scotland car', as he himself would have said during his childhood in Brabant), with the marbled flesh and muscles of Rank Xérox, Liberatore's cult hero, and, simultaneously, the calm chiaroscuri of Hopper's paintings. His Cindy Sherman-esque filmstills, from films that don't always exist, present sordid scenes of violent news items, always bathed in a northern light, like an Annunciation by Fra Angelico. Guy Peellaert was his teacher, his fairy, the godmother who leaned over his cradle. Peellaert, who needed only one image to convey the 129,600 names in a film. That's a lot of names, in just a few lines. Racasse's imagination is full of references: he's a cultured man. Racasse has worked extensively for the living arts (a wild evening is living art). What is alive dies (except the moment, which is sometimes eternal). This work precedes the event, announces it, sometimes accompanies it. The event passes. It produces these eternal moments and disappears. Another one comes along and it starts all over again. It's a jerky, frenetic pace. You have to move quickly, deliver things on time. It's a team sprint. Once the line is crossed, Racasse, far from any external urgency, driven only by his inner urgency, returns to the solitude of a long-distance runner. Because he is still running, he cannot stop, he is like the revolution which is like a bicycle which, in order not to fall, goes. He then plunges with delight into the stubborn work of the craftsman, until a new event tears him away. This is how he cheats the blank page: by carrying out, in parallel with his work as an artist of the event, several series, at the same time, which, themselves, never end. Posters for films that don't exist, dioramas of battlefields (Waterloo! Waterloo!) evoking current political events and the 'great men' who shape them, through elections and wars, under the watchful eye of Walter Bull, his Beelzebub, chicories, fries, atomiums (atomia?), Saint King Baudouin and his virgin Fabiola, the truth of putrescible flesh in clichéd representations of kitsch love, sex workers like portraits of queens... And don't be surprised if you don't recognize all of Racasse's Warhol-esque portraits of icons: in his eyes, all his friends are pop stars. Excerpt from the book 'Every Day is Picture Day' | 2020