Out of Focus

This collection of paintings picks up where Luper’s solo show “Ubiquity” left off. Here, Luper creates textures and layers using an airbrush and hand brush on plexiglass. Viewing the work is similar to looking at a slide through a microscope. The paint is flattened under the plexiglass leaving a pristine surface that encases the paint. Swirling, colorful layers combine with geometric shapes and intertwining lines to create the sense of movement and change. The energy present in the “Ubiquity” paintings is conjured up again in this series and seems to pick up momentum.

Diverging from those earlier paintings on plexiglass, Luper has incorporated the rectangle in the center of the paintings as a focal point. The rectangles are photographs taken by Luper that he alters on his computer. He removes details and sometimes blurs the photos before painting the image onto the plexi. The process the photographs go through before appearing in this form is in itself mimetic of the ways in which we experience our lives and can, perhaps, give the viewer a better understanding of the true nature of our reality. Luper describes these paintings as “a still life of the mind.” They are memories and thoughts transformed by time and space, overlapped and crowded by other incidents or ideas, now intwined and working as one with the past, present, and future.

All of these paintings are housed in frames made by Luper.