LASSEUR

Feelings

I paint the feeling before it finds a word — then I let the word slip in anyway.

Luca Lasseur is a painter based in Malta, working in acrylic, oil stick, spray and sand on canvas. Her work moves between abstraction and figuration, sometimes within a single piece. Some canvases are quiet, textured, nearly monochrome. Others are loud, figurative, written over in half a dozen hands.

Before painting, there were other lives. Modeling. Travel. A long stretch of performing, of being looked at, being wanted, being whatever the room needed her to be. She was good at it. It was not hers. She learned early that being looked at and being seen are not the same thing, and can even be opposites.

Painting reversed the direction of the gaze. On canvas she is not the image. She is the eye, the hand, the decision. Nothing is posed. She paints mostly at night, in long sessions, without plans. Pieces are not sketched in advance. What comes up, goes on. The finished canvas is the first time she sees what she was trying to say.

Each painting carries a story. She does not tell all of them.

Lasseur is the name of her father, who died when she was seventeen. She took his name for the work because the work is what she wants to leave, and his name is what she wants to leave it under.

She is early in this. She is not pretending otherwise. What is here is what exists so far.

Luca Lasseur works between studios in Malta and Madrid.