July 20 – August 9 2019 – Common Sense is very pleased to present the Canadian debut exhibition of The Generosity of Nature, landscape paintings by Miami-based visual artist Lucas Blanco, July 20 – August 9.
[Closing reception: Friday, August 9, from 5-8 pm – the artist will be in attendance.]
“I grew up in rural Michigan, to a German mother and 2nd generation Puerto Rican/Finnish father. In my formative years, I grew confused by the art that people were telling me was supposedly good. My own taste disagreed. My taste was pretty malformed back then (some would argue still is!), but the fact remained, most of the art I saw didn’t pass what I started to call the ‘sniff test’.
It wasn’t until I started looking for my own and reading artists and critics like John Link, and Darby Bannard (who as fate would have it, both became mentors to me for which I’m forever grateful), that I started to realize I wasn’t wrong, I just didn’t have enough confidence in my own taste. Over the years, that feeling relented, and I was able to see art for the glorious end in itself that it is. My hope is that these pictures bring the viewer some inkling of the energies that I intuited while I created them.”
—Lucas Blanco
“[Lucas Blanco] is taking big orders here, orders that he will have to fill in the future if he wants to keep going. But they are real, not driven by what appears on the pages of the leading art mags, and come from his own innards. He is looking into the past, both at the methods of gel painters and for whatever it is that correlation with reality can add. He has backed up, at least some would say, and I would not argue with them, except to remind everyone it is for the purpose of going forward. He makes objects to look at, by god, not think about. If you disagree that constitutes “forward”, you must at least agree it is off the beaten path.”
—John Link
Common Sense 