LUCAS LAMENHA | AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH
LUCAS LAMENHA | By Ariel SU

“The following pieces are part of a new collection developed from universal pop culture references and bring new characters and elements created from memories and inspirations of my daily life and reflections.
This new series, which I usually call “space cubism,” brings in certain characters as a proposal for a reinterpretation of cubism, with science fiction and space travel as the setting for a new and original universe created over the last few years in my studio.
The idea of completely filling the available space is to reflect on the excess information of the present day in a light, harmonious and fun way, with the intention of leading people to an abstract feeling of fullness and relief.”
– Lucas Lamenha

Graduating in advertising, Lucas Lamenha has been working as a creative for over 15 years. He has received significant national and international awards throughout his career, such as 5 trophies in the Gramado World Award (2003 and 2005) and 2 Short Lists in the London International Festival (2003), one of the most revered festivals in the world.
His experience as Creative Director in advertising led Lucas Lamenha to explore and discover himself as an artist.
Lucas uses graphic elements and characters that reflect the modern world’s chaotic surplus of information and work together to convey a larger story.
He draws the viewer in repeatedly and provokes the public by using storytelling as a key element in his thematic, transformative way of converting memories into stories told with spray, acrylic, and marker – Stories about a ludic, original and colorful universe of his own making. The uniqueness of his strokes and his outstanding style imprint generalities, such as numbers, music, dilemmas, idiosyncrasies, love, and peace, that translate some of Lucas’ essence, past and present, into paper, canvas, and objects. By doing so, Lucas is taking the sub-genre of “doodle art” into previously uncharted territory.
It is a great pleasure to feature one of today’s most unique and renovative artists; called by some ‘The New Basquiat’, and others call him ‘The rising star of our generation; but surely, he is making waves in the contemporary art world.

“I am an extremely calm and positive person toward the world.
And my intention, in all the pieces, is to convey a little of that calm and that optimism to people.”
– Lucas Lamenha

Lucas Lamenha is represented by Chic Evolution in Art Gallery

Gallery: chicevolutioninart.com | Instagram: @lucaslamenha

AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH
LUCAS LAMENHA | By Ariel SU

Art Market Magazine:
Thank you, Lucas; It’s a pleasure featuring this interview. Your work is extraordinary and has recently made waves in the Asian art market field with continuous growth in Europe and the U.S.
Before we start exploring your unique artistic style and the effect of this success on your career, let’s start with the beginning. You shifted your life from the advertising world as a creative director to the art field, where you were awarded respectable international awards and gained this success. But what drew you to the creative areas from the beginning? Did you grow up in an artistic environment?

Lucas Lamenha: I appreciate the words and the opportunity to present my work in such a reputable magazine as Art Market Magazine.
Despite not working with art, my parents always encouraged me to practice artistic activities, such as drawing and music.
As a child, my mother had a habit of drawing random objects on paper while talking on the phone. That naturally sparked my interest in drawing, and I inherited the same habit of talking on the phone while drawing words, numbers, and objects.
As a child, my family also traveled a lot by car, listening to the Beatles, and that ended up awakening a huge passion for music.
When I was 12, my father put me in a school to learn keyboards, where I graduated two years later. I also started playing guitar with the theoretical musical basis that the keyboard gave me. A few bands later, I decided I would like to work with music, and that’s when I entered the College of Advertising. My idea at the beginning was to graduate and open a music production company for commercials, but I fell in love with the whole artistic side of the profession, especially the creative area, where I worked throughout my career.

Art Market Magazine: What was the reason for your professional change, and what are the main differences between the two fields (Advertising and Art) from your artistic point of view?

Lucas Lamenha: In 2015 when I was at my career high – after years of experience as a Creative Director and already the owner of my own advertising agency- I took a 21-day trip to some European countries.
Those days completely changed my life.
I remember precisely the day and moment when I decided to start painting. It was a Sunday morning in London; I had spent a few hours in the Shoreditch district contemplating a series of artistic interventions on the walls until I saw a smaller drawing, extremely simple, cheerful, colorful, totally different from all the other giant and far-fetched paintings.
That I had admired until then. That drawing reminded me of the characters I had already invented and drew daily on paper while I thought about creating the ads and campaigns during all the years of advertising. In front of this drawing, I decided that the first thing I would do when I returned to Brazil would be to buy the materials and start to transfer my universe to a canvas. That’s exactly what I did.

In the first two months after the trip, I worked a lot in an experimental way until I arrived at my first original work, a small canvas measuring 20 x 30 cm, which I named” Plato Fox 1 “, inspired by the book by José Saramago that I was reading where there was a quote by the philosopher on the back cover.
Once I found my style, I started producing a small piece daily and posting it on a new Instagram account I created exclusively for the project. After a few weeks, the works were quickly selling out, and six months later, I received an invitation from an English curator for a solo exhibition in London.
With the sudden success of the work, the quick financial return, and the certainty that I had managed to create my own identity, I started to plan the transition from one profession to the other, which definitely happened in 2018, after my first exhibition at Burning Man.
Today I believe that the main difference between the two professions is the creative freedom that art provides and that every publicist or professional/artist hopes to have one day.

Art Market Magazine: Your artistic style is exceptional and unusual. It gives a connotation to a childhood sketchbook of drawings. Has this always been your style, or has it evolved over the years?

Lucas Lamenha: Throughout my advertising career, I’ve always been in the habit of filling in a sheet of paper while trying to come up with good ideas. So when I started to think about my style for the canvas, this background came naturally, and I ended up following the inks I was already unconsciously doing with the pen every day. With time and daily dedication to the studio, my drawings gradually evolved, I developed and improved my techniques, and new characters were created, always maintaining originality and this purposefully childish, cheerful, and primitive tone that I believe is part of my message as an artist.

Art Market Magazine: You worked as a creative director for fifteen years before making this shift in your life. Looking back, do you regret not doing this step years ago? What was the reaction of those around you when you decided to leave the advertising world?

Lucas Lamenha: No, I don’t. I believe that everything I learned and experienced in advertising was significant for my training as an artist. To become a Creative Director, I had to learn a lot about art, and today I can see this history in my work, such as the layout of spaces, the balance of colors, and the choice of typologies. In addition to the need to create differentials that mark me as an innovative artist, such as using the sides of the canvas as part of the work and the hand-drawn packaging, It is also possible to observe a series of references from the world of advertising and music in the content of the works.

Art Market Magazine: Your artistic style is reminiscent of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s early works, with its honesty and innocent elements. What is the base of your artistic style? Where do the inspiration and the ideas come from? What influenced your art?

Lucas Lamenha: In advertising, I got used to creating under pressure and working hard on several different ideas and projects a day, in addition to the obligation of always having to be original and innovative in communication and aesthetics. I believe this greatly influences my creative process as an artist.
My work is like a diary of memories and references I have conquered throughout my life. Some parts of the work are planned, but most of it is intuitive. For example, I start a line in many drawings without knowing exactly how it will end. And I’m making decisions about where to go along the way. This makes each character unique and always new. This process comes a lot from the influence of Picasso and the Cubist movement, which are my primary references as an artist. I like to see art as a possibility to deconstruct reality and find beauty in the different.

Art Market Magazine: Is it possible to say that your artistic style reflects your point of view on reality? Maybe it’s a way of preserving childhood?

Lucas Lamenha: Yes. I think the playful part of childhood is the time when we feel safe, optimistic, and calm about life. I think that feeling is increasingly rare in today’s world. My trait is relatively primitive and brings some of that childhood innocence and lightness. My style comes with a clear proposal to be accessible to everyone and aims to expose a little joy and color to an increasingly confused, sad, and pessimistic world. If art reflects its time, I think my work can be considered a lifeboat in this sea of ​​negativity that has kept people from remembering the good things that are out there waiting for us.

Art Market Magazine: Many of your latest paintings are large-scale artworks. Isn’t it a long process, filling the canvas with small elements and hundreds of details? How long does it take to complete a large-scale painting?

Lucas Lamenha:
Yes. The process is a little longer and more challenging as it requires creating new characters and elements, but the result always pays off in the end. This larger format also allows me to insert some storytelling into the work, like a spaceship race happening without anyone noticing. I think my style allows me to explore any format and surface, which ends up being another differential in my work.

Art Market Magazine: Let’s talk about the workflow. Do you have a collection of elements (Sort of a library of ready-designed elements) before you start the painting, or do you let the ideas flow fluently?

Lucas Lamenha: When I start a new artwork, I only plan the background and the color palette. Content flows during the creative production process. As these six years of my career were highly intense, I ended up creating a natural selection of an extensive visual vocabulary of original elements that allowed me to explore different compositions without losing repetition, which I think is fundamental to mark these characters with my signature and put my name in the history of art.

Art Market Magazine: In many of your paintings, we find elements related to space and aliens, car racing, balloons, and underwater creatures. Are these daydreaming subjects of the child in you?

Lucas Lamenha: As a child, I watched the classic ‘Star Trek’ series with my father daily, which created an affective memory of science fiction, which became an important reference in my drawings. I’ve always liked and had a passion for the retro aesthetic of science fiction, and I think that space is a subject that is not explored with originality in the art world. So in recent years,
I have been developing more and more this idea of ​​deconstructing the universe, creating a kind of cubist meta-verse of space, which I usually call “Space Cubism” or “Spaceonism,” where the characters give us the message that, despite being extremely different, they can live together in perfect harmony.

Art Market Magazine: What materials do you work with?

Lucas Lamenha: Spray, acrylic, and markers.

Art Market Magazine:
Tell us about your latest exhibitions and the success you have gained in Asian countries lately.

Lucas Lamenha: Last year I participated in exhibitions in Paris, Genoa, Milan, Madrid, and Innsbruck, Austria. The visibility of these exhibitions led me to a recent invitation to be part of a team of great artists represented on the Asian continent by Ting Ting Art Space, a gallery located in Taipei, Taiwan.
With a five-year contract signed last month, I became the only artist from outside Europe to be represented by the gallery, which today works in cooperation with Chic Evolution in Art, which is the gallery that manages my career worldwide. Starting in September, we will begin an intense circuit of renowned art fairs in several countries on the continent.

Art Market Magazine:
What reactions do the visitors of the exhibition have? What feelings would you like to convey to the viewer?

Lucas Lamenha: Feedback from visitors and curators has always been super positive about my work since my first exhibition in 2017 in London.
In my first solo exhibition at Burning Man in 2018, I also had the opportunity to test my style in a space that received hundreds of people from all over the world, and the feedback was incredible, which gave me even more confidence for the future.
I am an extremely calm and positive person toward the world. And my intention, in all the pieces, is to convey a little of that calm and that optimism to people. This is the main reason my work reaches audiences of all ages, genders, and social classes.

Art Market Magazine:
How did the global pandemic and the lockdowns affect your work? Did you find this period artistically challenging?

Lucas Lamenha: I ended 2019 with significant exhibitions, like Burning Man, for the second year, Paris and Gold Coast, Australia. Then, at the beginning of 2020, I was working on another exhibition that would take place in Paris, and there was an important fair in Brussels, Belgium, right after that. Unfortunately, everything was postponed indefinitely when the pandemic started, and, like everyone else, I was also anxious about the future. But I never stopped working. Instead, I focused even more on my style’s evolution and created a series of new collections quickly sold over the internet. During this period, I also started working on the prototype of my first sculpture, developed in partnership with a company in São Paulo and a factory in China.

Art Market Magazine: What does the future bring? Where can we enjoy viewing your work? Are there any planned exhibitions in the months to come?

Lucas Lamenha: Today my work can be found exclusively physically in the United States at Chic Evolution in Art, in Taiwan at Ting Ting Art Space, in Paris at OA Fine Art, and in Switzerland at PicTrix Gallery.