Lucas Blok's paintings emanate and pulse with a quiet complexity. One first sees the vivid color fields arranged in geometric tautness, then the subtleties in color and shape begin their work. The pristine surfaces of Blok's paintings vibrate: dominant shapes seem to dematerialize; color chords register their optical strength; phantom colors migrate or surge across the picture plane.
 
 
The artist ushers the viewer into a world of color relationships that play on optical nerves and emotions alike. Adjacent color areas harmonize or generate delicate discords that become, like musical compositions, harmony, rhythm, discord, balance.

"In music, the linear time factor--rhythm--along with harmony, volume, and intensity, creates the experience. It is constantly moving, changing," explains the painter. "In my work I utilize color and optics to achieve a similar experience: creating time- rhythm, within a static image. I aspire towards a visual music."
 
"I avoid symbolism in my work," declares the artist in reference to the symbolic content perceived in certain colors such as red (blood, passion, dynamism, sexuality), or violet (sorrow, silence, mystery, death). "In my work there is nothing like that, I struggle to stay away from symbolic shapes and color relationships. I try to find colors that allow the viewer to open-up to experience sensorially."
 
Blok explores his concerns in his painted universe in unique ways. To avoid textural distractions, he airbrushes acrylic paint onto his surfaces. These atomized pigments produce a mysterious density. For visual dynamics akin to rhythm, pattern, and syncopation, Blok composes with neutral shapes--bands, rectangles, lozenges--and varies the crispness of edge, intensity of color, and verticality / horizontality.
 
Optically, colors which are not there but which are complements to the painted colors, appear; lines / edges begin to vibrate; and whole shapes seem to travel across the surface. This optical movement is the subtle and sublime music of color that Blok explores.
 
Blok's seemingly spare world of simple shape and harmonious color vibrates with an inner life that, with contemplation, becomes a rich visual involvement of emotion, intellect, and spirit.

A r t i s t   S t a t e m e n t
 
The paintings I do have developed from the delight of exploring and learning about the why and how of my visual and emotional world. I have chosen to work with the unique human experience of color. I am fascinated by our ability to take the energy from sunlight and convert it into a process that can become and esthetic, informative, and spiritual experience.
 
To me such a process is profound. The paintings present a stage upon which this process can be seen and celebrated. I have maintained the simplest design elements in order to clarify my intention and yet have maintained enough design aspects to enable the kinetic and subjective nature of the color experience to form a composition of movement and tonal development.
 
In working in the painting I play, explore, visualize and generally commune with that which I have not yet seen. In that process I find emotional and unexplained experiences that become part of what I consider my living. The record of that process is the painting.
 

- L u c a s   B l o k