Francois Marie Lucet’s extensive training and experience have refined his artistic sensibilities to the point where collectors seeking expertise on early 20th-century French painting, particularly works by Braque, Juan Gris, Van Gogh, and Monet, often seek his counsel. Yet, there’s a lesser-known aspect of Lucet’s connoisseurship: to deepen his understanding and appreciation of his favorite French artists, he has meticulously “re-created” some of their paintings. Once these re-creations are complete, with any aesthetic or technical challenges resolved, Lucet signs the pieces with his name and often gifts them to delighted friends abroad.
Recently, Lucet has developed a fascination with the strikingly modern qualities he perceives in Ethiopia’s austere religious art, especially the icons and frescoes found in remote monasteries and isolated churches. He set himself the challenge of understanding how a 600-year-old, tradition-bound system of religious imagery, characterized by such an economy of line and color, could produce art that resonates with contemporary sensibilities.
After an intense study of original Ethiopian icons and reproductions, Lucet began a series of paintings he refers to as “paraphrases of Ethiopian religious images.” He recreated the textured surfaces using fragments of burlap cloth covered with multiple thin layers of plaster and restricted his palette to the traditional Ethiopian colors of green, red, and yellow.
Despite numerous frustrated attempts to replicate the mineral pigment hues of the originals using acrylic paint, Lucet eventually succeeded by isolating and cataloging the tonalities and forms central to the Ethiopian tradition. The breakthrough came while he was coloring a segment of a Madonna’s robe. Lucet noticed that the flat, minimal contoured units of form—the head, hands, and garment layers—if considered as abstract elements separated by lead instead of the typical thick black lines used by Ethiopian artists, made the frescoes and icons appear much like segments of a stained glass window. The limited color palette within these forms was also significant. Interestingly, only the stained glass designed by Matisse in the late 1950s for the Chapel of the Rosary in Venice utilized such a restricted range of colors—Matisse chose almost the identical Ethiopian palette of ultramarine blue, green, and yellow.
Matisse’s stained glass design itself emerged from the cutout compositions of his final years, which are also abstracted colored forms placed in close proximity, much like Lucet’s segmented Ethiopian images. Lucet’s conclusion is that, despite its formulaic nature, Ethiopian religious art inherently possesses a “modern” inclination towards abstraction in design and composition.
Instead of producing a scholarly treatise, Lucet’s unique approach to studying art leads him to create more art. He embodies both roles: the artistic scholar and the scholarly artist. In doing so, he seems to embody Jacob Bronowski’s principle governing the successful interaction between viewer and object—the dialogue between the significant and the sign: “…the work of art is not something that you can look at passively. It must move you to pose two different questions. One is, What was he trying to do? And the other is, Why did he do it that way? [The viewer must ask not only] ‘I see what it is for,’ but also, ‘I see how it was done’…until you have answered that (latter) question, you have not recreated the work, and no work speaks to you until you recreate it.”
Recently, Lucet has developed a fascination with the strikingly modern qualities he perceives in Ethiopia’s austere religious art, especially the icons and frescoes found in remote monasteries and isolated churches. He set himself the challenge of understanding how a 600-year-old, tradition-bound system of religious imagery, characterized by such an economy of line and color, could produce art that resonates with contemporary sensibilities.
After an intense study of original Ethiopian icons and reproductions, Lucet began a series of paintings he refers to as “paraphrases of Ethiopian religious images.” He recreated the textured surfaces using fragments of burlap cloth covered with multiple thin layers of plaster and restricted his palette to the traditional Ethiopian colors of green, red, and yellow.
Despite numerous frustrated attempts to replicate the mineral pigment hues of the originals using acrylic paint, Lucet eventually succeeded by isolating and cataloging the tonalities and forms central to the Ethiopian tradition. The breakthrough came while he was coloring a segment of a Madonna’s robe. Lucet noticed that the flat, minimal contoured units of form—the head, hands, and garment layers—if considered as abstract elements separated by lead instead of the typical thick black lines used by Ethiopian artists, made the frescoes and icons appear much like segments of a stained glass window. The limited color palette within these forms was also significant. Interestingly, only the stained glass designed by Matisse in the late 1950s for the Chapel of the Rosary in Venice utilized such a restricted range of colors—Matisse chose almost the identical Ethiopian palette of ultramarine blue, green, and yellow.
Matisse’s stained glass design itself emerged from the cutout compositions of his final years, which are also abstracted colored forms placed in close proximity, much like Lucet’s segmented Ethiopian images. Lucet’s conclusion is that, despite its formulaic nature, Ethiopian religious art inherently possesses a “modern” inclination towards abstraction in design and composition.
Instead of producing a scholarly treatise, Lucet’s unique approach to studying art leads him to create more art. He embodies both roles: the artistic scholar and the scholarly artist. In doing so, he seems to embody Jacob Bronowski’s principle governing the successful interaction between viewer and object—the dialogue between the significant and the sign: “…the work of art is not something that you can look at passively. It must move you to pose two different questions. One is, What was he trying to do? And the other is, Why did he do it that way? [The viewer must ask not only] ‘I see what it is for,’ but also, ‘I see how it was done’…until you have answered that (latter) question, you have not recreated the work, and no work speaks to you until you recreate it.”