A portal to the imagination
Adam Sloat
Helios Lucida’s abstract portraiture is an escape from ‘these unprecedented times’ — or is it?
Broker/Owner
Your Boulder Real Estate Expert and Music Guy
By Caitlin Rockett
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WHAT’S THE BEST COMPLIMENT YOU’VE RECEIVED? Question: So Adam, what’s the best compliment you received as an agent?
Answer: Being told by a client that I kept their transaction alive and improved their terms and outcome, without them really being surprised by such results. To have a client’s trust like that and for them to know they can count on me no matter what comes up is a pretty big deal. It feels good and it’s a responsibility I take extremely seriously.
Top: “Now It’s Over”
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Middle: “The Flower Peddler” Bottom: “The Last Great Entertainer”
JUNE 18, 2020
elios Lucida’s exhibition at the Firehouse Art Center proves Oscar Wilde was right: Life imitates art far more than art imitates life. The Conifer resident’s abstract portraiture straddles the line between the real and surreal, taking the ancient art form that has recorded human existence for millennia and pushing it to the edge of recognition. Though Lucida wouldn’t say this himself, it’s terribly relevant to “these unprecedented times,” when a virus, police brutality and a gaslighting, image-obsessed president have made us question what’s real, what’s “normal.” What does normal really mean — and is it even something worth fighting for? For Lucida — for his art, at least — it’s not. “I didn’t want the artwork to be illustrative,” he says of his portraits. “And by making it abstract I felt like it left an opening for the viewer looking at it. I didn’t want it to just be a painting of a person. I wanted to have some element to it, whether it was changing the colors or the structure or distorting it in some way, that would allow imagination to sort of expand.” The Firehouse exhibition, Unusual Suspects, is catnip for the imagination, offering an initial stimulation that gives way to a sense of mellow calm. Based mostly on photographs Lucida took of various drag performers over several years, the collection revels in dynamic color and texture. “I build the image up in layers of paint until I have a traditional rendering of a portrait,” Lucida said in a statement about the exhibition. “Then, I start to add additional layers of paint that I distort with various mediums, brushes, palette knives and homemade tools. This is the high wire event for each one of these paintings; as I push it towards the edge, I use my intuition as an artist to decide at which point to solidify the visual chaos at the desired moment.” Like Philippe Petit, balanced 400 meters above New York City, Lucida only steps off the wire when he’s finished or it starts to rain. “By pushing it too far, I’ve had to destroy some paintings because they just blew up,” Lucida says. “I lost contact with my artwork.” The work in Unusual Suspects is reminiscent of the figurative work of 20th century painter Francis Bacon, whom Lucida counts as an inspiration. But unlike Bacon, who sought to render “the brutality of fact,” Lucida is less concerned with facts than he is with imagination. “I prefer that [the viewer] take from it what they will,” he says. “I don’t mind explaining what the artwork means to me or how I made the artwork, but somebody else observing it is going to have a different interpretation of what that is based on who they are, their life experiences. I think the only thing that I hope they I
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