PLANETS

HERMES LUCAS

Hermes Lucas is a photographer of life, working across the globe to capture diverse cultures through vast, breath-taking landscapes and intimate portraits, to portray the magnificence and subtle nobility underlying and permeating even the most hostile of environments.

Planets is an extensive insight, presenting work from some central series by the artist over recent years, taken through various travels as part of his judicial profession. Contextualised in many ways by the artist’s eminent career in international relations, dispute resolution and civil rights, the final artworks hold up a mirror to a life spent in pursuit of beauty, distinct and covert. More passion than pure profession, this fluid immersion in the tangible dynamics of politics, society, economy and culture is shared through the simplicity with which the work presents those notions converse to division and segregation – rather, egalitarianism and universality. Reconciliation of tension becomes an act materialising on the surface of the image.

Hermes’ career has taken him around the world and into extraordinary situations – captured in moments both aesthetically and thematically exquisite. From abstract and painterly night and day scenes, reflections and “expressions”, through to intimate, poignant, often harsh, confrontations, it is within a unique space that his work exists – finding a rare equilibrium somewhere between fine art and reportage.

Driven by early passions for draughtsmanship as well as work in architectural practices, Hermes’ photojournalistic approach is furthermore a result of classical aesthetics and art historical influences such as ancient Greek sculpture, Impressionism and the pre-Raphaelites, with further discernible parallels with the photographic work of Hungarian Andre Kertesz and Italian Gianni Berengo Gardin. Hermes was awarded the  The ‘Lorenzo il Magnifico’ International Award for Photography at the Florence Biennale in 2015.

In his “Planets” series, from which the exhibition’s title is taken, Hermes’ proficiency in language of his medium is laid bare. Though initially presenting seemingly uncomplicated crowd scenes from Rio de Janeiro, staged within the macrocosm of the vast and awesome mountains, the sea and the horizon, this is coupled with a commitment to reaching beneath the surface to the microcosm – the personal, human story of the individual. The aesthetic is painterly, awash with light and warmth, dynamic with an essential spiritual presence and energy.