The Art of Lucas Pertile
The concept of artists intoxicating themselves in search of inspiration is hardly novel, quite the reverse in fact. However, Lucas Pertile is the first I’ve come across to draw inspiration from the poison of a scorpion sting, let alone to make the experience one of the cornerstones of his oeuvre. And yet the idea of sitting alone in a cabin in the jungle, waiting to see whether you’re going to live or die while all around the jungle taunts you with its choral roar and impossibly rich colours seems an excellent description of the atmosphere one might expect at one of Pertile’s exhibitions.
Hallucination, dreamscape, vision... Pertile says his process is driven by the subconscious, a voyage to another dimension with the resulting art generated by what he has been able to bring back with him, and psychoanalysis is certainly an important factor in his work, but one suspects that it also very much depends on close observation of the world around him. Strange as that might sound when presented with images of magical flora and fauna often rendered in psychedelic colours, it becomes less so when one thinks of the jungle environment where he does much of his work, the truly otherworldly landscape of the Misiones rainforest, as well as the landscapes from his childhood in Chaco, Argentina, where the scrubland isn’t nearly so lush but is just as inhospitable, if not more so. Then there is the key role played by memory; Pertile has called the recurring monkey figure that appears in much of his work a kind of self-portrait, but it is also based on his memories of a monkey that would follow him around when he was a child playing by the river near his home. Combined with a keen awareness of art history; there are clear echoes of Fauvism and Primitivism as well as the Latin American branches of the Neo Figurative and New Image movements, one gets a sense of the depth and tangible realities to be found in Pertile’s painting. This firm academic grounding is perhaps only to be expected from the grandson of one of Chaco’s most famous artists, Alfredo Pertile, whose studio introduced the young Lucas to a whole new form of adventure in which one wields a brush rather than a machete.
Underlying this vivacious combination of inner, outer and fantastical worlds is another key element: death. Described by the artist as, along with the unconscious, ‘The only truth that we all share’, mortality is sometimes explicitly foregrounded with skeletal figures, ghosts and skulls, but it also lurks in the background in dark brushstrokes that serve to underline and enhance the colour and raw movement of the other elements of the composition. A universal reality, death seeps into Pertile’s world, filling in the gaps between the bright shapes and sensuous forms, always there even if we’d rather not admit it, dazzled as we are by the gorgeous flowers and fantastical figures.
This seems to me to be an overarching theme of Pertile’s art: the tug of war between life and death, the light and the dark. Often, when taking in the most vibrant and colourful of his pieces, images that radiate a pure, sensuous joy, the viewer finds their eye drawn to a dark spot in the corner; a patch of shadow, or the hollow of a tree trunk, reminding them that all these wonderful things are transient, destined to disappear. Inversely, in the gloomier compositions, there always seem to be one or more sources of light or colour arranged in such a way that one feels the promise of more to come: beacons of hope for characters and viewers alike.
To experience Pertile’s art is to engage with an artist forever transporting us back to that cabin where, skin throbbing, under siege from a natural world that has just revealed its most vicious side, we sit and wait for the visions to come, unaware, and perhaps uncaring, whether they are harbingers of the end or a new dawn.
Kit Maude, February 2023.