Lucas Dupuy - Filtered Form
Text written as a foreword to Lucas Dupuy's book, Collected Arrangements, published in 2019 by Foolscap Editions.
'I love electronic music in its most awkward forms and see parallels between the structures of noise and form'[1]
Lucas Dupuy. Photograph by Cath Dupuy
Lucas Dupuy draws and paints structure. His work uses space, geometry, line and tone, in an apparently tireless reframing of his environment. It is both intuitive and responsive and each of these acts can be attached to the context in which it is made. The noise and form of south London are a combination of precision and disruption; of order and chaos; of structure and disarray. These drawings in particular capture some of the binary qualities of the manufactured, yet organic, conditions of large cities.
Lucas has a deep connection to the less obvious spaces of the city – the type of knowledge that only comes from being somewhere, properly being there as a being. The architecture and materiality of the large south London housing estates are both formative and also provide context for his work. Drawings and paintings are informed by the angular, accentuated forms of in-situ concrete found throughout the official architecture of the state and the non-attributed reliefs, tiles and minor public sculptures nestled amongst it. Lucas has installed temporary works in residual spaces in and around the mid-century slab and point blocks of the London County Council Architects’ Department and, more recently, on buildings in Japan. The influence of, and the connection to, these forms and materials is explicit in his aesthetic.
Box Architecture, Lucas Dupuy.
There is consistent linear precision in Lucas’ work which is often balanced against blurry and indistinct forms. The space he uses to balance - or to deliberately create imbalance - is the page. Whether making marks on paper, canvas or concrete, the idea of the page; it’s ratios; its limits; its borders; header; footer, and so on, seem to perpetuate his approach to composition. The page and its shapes, in line and in paragraph, are somehow mimicked in the marks he makes and how he situates them. He relates his work to dyslexia, learning aids and his own coping strategies and states, ‘Much of my recent work draws from these strategies and my paintings now often feature shapes, symbols and diagrams that stand in for something unreadable and unknown’. I think it is more than just the ‘shapes, symbols and diagrams’ of each drawing or painting that reflect the experience of dyslexia and education – the page has become paramount. The page has become the spatial organising device across much of his recent work. Against and within the context of the page (or using the page as medium in some recent collage work) the page forms the context, geometry and frame for his lines and forms.
Cover of Basic Channel CD compilation.
Lucas often draws and paints whilst listening to music. He is a self-confessed fan of ‘90s techno and electronica, itself a peculiar aesthetic that parallels his formal production. Much of the audio and the associated imagery had discordant, atavistic and ephemeral qualities. In the same way that the stretched and blurred fonts of the Basic Channel records reflected the compressed, cavernous sonics of the grooves, Lucas’ works are filtered versions of the sound, sight, form and material of the city – a mode of synaesthesia.
Sound mirrors, Denge. Author’s photograph
These parallels between the structures of noise and form can also be used to consider Lucas’ preoccupation with the sound mirrors of the coastline of England. The largest concentration of the abstract, poured concrete bowls and arcs periodically punctuate the cliffs and shingle beaches of Kent, where the majority of research took place. The mirrors were designed as early warning systems, first for zeppelin airships and then aeroplanes, in advance of the development of radar. The various sized bowls and curved planes were assessed to see how much they could amplify the sound of incoming enemy aircraft – to try and hear them before they could be seen and to work out from which direction they approached. Arrays of microphones were positioned in front of the mirrors to capture the reflected sound in spatial compositions created by mathematical projections of acoustic science. The mirrors were essentially experimental and their real utility as part of a defence system was never truly tested. The precise, acoustically engineered space and fields of and around the sound mirrors contrasts against the expanse of reverberating air it was designed to survey. Obviously, some of the drawings presented here are figurative references to the sound mirrors, however, the mirrors are akin to the character of Lucas’ work more generally, in their precise, yet experimental forms.
[1] This is a quote from the introduction to my own book about how I became fascinated with modernist and brutalist architectural production of the mid-century. It is a sentence that began part of the conversation between Lucas and I about his work. Brook, R. (2017) Manchester Modern (Manchester: The Modernist Society).