Megasculptures
Due to a certain dissatisfaction with existing roofs, Lucas felt the need to come up with a different design in the early 1980s. The architectural-constructive need is very strong in Lucas. Parallel to the development of images, he continues to design structures.
The problems with this turned out to be major. The large number of technical requirements made it very difficult to simultaneously stay out of the ordinary and obtain the simplest possible structure. Because a sculptor prefers to give priority to the aesthetic, painful combinatorial difficulties also arose.
In terms of content, Lucas sought a three-dimensional plastic translation of concepts from music, such as tone, sound, color, rhythm, playing, … from a formal tabula rasa, into a plastic result that refers only to itself. Hence the problems with the naming ‘stage’.
Materially, he maintains the principle of building relatively extremely cheap constructions, without neglecting contemporary materials and possibilities. By being strongly involved with the materials themselves, he automatically starts from those materials as an intrinsic building block of the result. In this way, these materials are used where they become irreplaceable and thus emphasize their essence.
Kaaitheater. 1985
Lucas received the invitation to participate in the Kaaitheater festival of ’85. Hugo De Greef of Ancienne Belgique commissioned him to design an installation in their renovated space, entirely in steel and a smooth dark red.
“After a very deep search and with the photos of Carlos Dekeyrel, I finally arrived at a design. With a drawing this time. And very exceptionally, I made a model based on this.”
One of the hallmarks of theatre, illusion, formed the basis of a totally illusory ‘machine’, matching the industrial look of the building, a three-dimensional representation of absurdity, the illusion of the lust for power. His Implosion Machine pulled the top and bottom of the surrounding space towards itself with cables and pulleys and eventually destroyed itself. The device, nine times fourteen meters and two meters high, hung from the ceiling with cables, a structure of steel beams containing three crane-like Plexiglas shapes with a stainless steel skeleton, interconnected with links in the same materials, the whole completely transparent. Centrally at the bottom an abstracted “winch”. From the frame, thick ship ropes with lifelike pulleys run through the building, to the ‘Bar Américain’ and the main entrance.
“As the winch was turned with minimal effort, the force became greater and greater, like gears in a bicycle, until the whole thing destroyed itself, as did the space in which it was mounted.”
Kite. Gentse Feesten 1983
In 1983 Lucas realized his first stage cover ‘De Vlieger’, the opening sculpture of his oeuvre. The work received enormous attention in the press. It was also included in the archives of the Stuttgart ‘Institut für leichte Flächentragwerke’.
Butterfly. Gentse Feesten 1986
A deployment in two parts on a sloping 11 m high heptagonal steel mast, tapering from 70 cm to a flat top of 30 cm. This structure of a mast and four ‘floating triangles’ was interconnected with cables on a base of 18 tons of bolted steel beams.
The calculations were made by Brother Jules, an architecture teacher at Sint Lucas Ghent. He worked on it for three very long days. Due to a lack of proper sails – after a complete rain disaster during the second year – the stage was taken to the scrap heap, immediately marking the end of Lucas’s seven-year collaboration with non-profit organization Trefpunt.
Water Lily. Gentse Feesten 1987 - Ontwerp
Simplicity and thinking from primary feasible and affordable possibilities are again the basis here. The intention is to create space inside and at the same time look monumental: the largest possible cover with as little material as possible. This functionally strange organic construction, easily realizable, commemorates the standard shoebox of a stage and speaks. The canvas at the back, “infini”, suggests infinity. 41 asymmetrical frames in galvanized shelving tube in different bright colors are covered by an opaque white polyester tarpaulin. The structure maintains itself.
Meccano. Gentse Feesten 2002
Creating a functional work of art requires the combination of aesthetic standards, such as originality, authenticity and beauty, and purely technical requirements. In this case it was also a concept for a specific location. Elements of the three main buildings are integrated into the design. The conical columns and the monumental high vault refer to the cathedral. The central asymmetrical roof panel suggests the shards, created by the bursting energy of light and human movement. This asymmetry is consistently extended into all other panels such as the ever-changing stained glass windows of the church. The belfry is represented in the reference to the dragon: the pointed mouth, the wings, the tail and the legs, albeit within the strict standards of the third building, the NTG. Because the eye also wants something during the day, it became a multi-colored composition of whimsical metal structures in the toy atmosphere of a light-footed giant meccano.
Night of the Proms - Kite 1985-1986 | Instrument 1987-1988 | Bat 1989
The designs for the Night of the Proms were not purely functional, not directly decorative, but rather a plastic addition, a monumental, understandable sculpture in harmonious dialogue with all other facets of the celebration. In such a structure, technical and situational standards are of great importance. The challenge is to meet this as efficiently as possible within the limits of artistic integrity, the aesthetic and ethical values that Lucas holds. “In my non-functional sculpture I also experience that freedom within its limitations, which perhaps constitutes its essential beauty.” A work acquires its specific identity precisely through all the norms and limitations imposed on it, and the more it meets them, the more it acquires its richness. The most important technical requirement of optimal sound reproduction in an acoustically very difficult space (a shell-shaped construction in sound-reflecting material) limited the aesthetic freedom and strongly determined the final design.
The wing membrane of the kite, the instrument and the bat wing always listen to: beautiful, simple in form and material, recognizable, communicative.
“I have always had the feeling that the things I make are for me until the moment they are finished, then they belong to myself and to everyone who likes them. In this case as part of the entire Proms event.”
Bat. Cons-la-Grandville 2008
Through his friend Count Augustin d’Ursel, Lucas was commissioned in 2008 for a summer exhibition in the park of a beautiful castle in Northern France. He spent a €15,000 subsidy on a monumental ‘Bat’ (20 meters wide and high) made of steel, canvas and cables. The intention was to create an eye-catcher that fully matched the ancient rare trees, the wild park and the centuries-old buildings. The monument also had to be universal enough to be placed in any open space. An atmosphere of animal, sailing ship, kite, organic and inorganic. It became a monumental synthesis of years of experience with monumental functional ones. The irreplaceability of steel and hot-dip galvanizing go hand in hand with the form and together form its essence and strength, at the core of the design as much based on the material itself as on the purely aesthetic urge to create. More than thirty years of working with steel and increasingly exploring its soul have led to this result.