Lukas Thaler’s Ungovernable World of Slime

Lukas Thaler’s first solo exhibition at Galerie Thoman, ‘ooze’, feels like a desert, rife with mirages. The experience of the artist’s wall-mounted works – wood panels daubed with acrylic resin, marble sand and ink – resides in their uppermost layers. Interacting with light, the paintings’ surfaces become loci for optical illusions, inviting us to investigate their meticulously sculpted forms. His aim, the artist tells me, is to ‘create the feeling that the colour is not on the object but comes out of it’. Drawing in the viewer, this ‘oozing’ effect almost invites touch: the beautifully crafted and luminous facades repeatedly evoke vitality, movement and organicity, yet beneath their animate textures lurks a cool  stillness.

Take, for example, ‘Soluble Subjects’ (all works 2024), a series of paintings that greets the visitor at the gallery entrance. Neatly arranged on rectangular aluminium frames, each panel is different in hue and consistency. Ranging topographically from flat to drippy, these abstractions present themselves as pure surfaces. A number of works feature laser-engraved drawings, such as the cartoonish sketches of trees in Soluble subjects (trickle sunset tree) or a wind-blowing cloud in Soluble subjects (Farbspucker) (Colour Spitter), both derived from anonymous jpgs that the artist found online. Others are inscribed with a single word – ‘reader’, ‘ooze’ or ‘figure’ – hinting at the absence of figuration in the show. Some surfaces appear more easily identifiable: one looks like tree bark, another resembles marble or folded drapes. Yet, everything is constantly slipping away into formlessness as the gaze moves back and forth, searching for something on which to moor itself.

This is why these subjects are soluble: our perception of them is somehow always ready to dissolve into indeterminacy. Ooze, after all, refers to a material that fundamentally exists between two different states. One is reminded of Jean-Paul Sartre’s le visqueux(viscous entity), first introduced in Being and Nothingness (1943), and characterized by being neither liquid nor solid but somewhere in the middle. Unlike solids, le visqueux resist being picked up to serve as a tool, yet neither does it flow: instead, it sticks to the hand that tries to grasp it, relentlessly unusable. Sartre called this phenomenon ‘the agony of water’, seeing in its ungovernable behaviour a form of agency – the revenge of matter on the tyrannical will of man.

Thaler subverts the resistance of le visqueux to practical utility, readily playing with the transformation of sculpture as seen in his ‘Logs’ series, featuring simple cylindrical shapes covered in plastic bark that lie on the gallery floor like unused theatre props. Large, round lightbulbs adorn some of them, with long, white electric cables sprouting from the opposite end as roots. These are fake, inverted trees to be repurposed as lampposts: they don’t eat light; they emit it. Looking at the uprooted forest, one might wonder what kind of hurricane has run amok in the gallery. But the thought doesn’t last: the illusion breaks and Thaler’s plastic, toy-like sculptures soon return to their purposefully disordered spatial arrangement.

Trickle, spit, condense: so many of the works in ‘ooze’ refer in their titles to an unstable state of matter. Yet the materials – once their luminous, hallucinatory spells are broken – appear dried, calcified, controllable. What they present is formlessness, yes, but a harmless, un-visqueux one. As such, the exhibition stages an illusionistic parody of the intrinsic drive of matter: it is the viewer’s own restlessness in the face of such indeterminacy which, as they move back and forth between Thaler’s works, projects a metamorphic quality onto their rigid surfaces. Once again, mirages in the desert.

Lukas Thaler’s ‘ooze’ is on view at Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman, Vienna, until 21 December

_{Main image: Lukas Thaler, Soluble subjects (ooze black), 2024, acrylic resin, marble sand, ink on wood, UV varnish, 49 × 29 × 2 cm. Cpurtesy: © Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman / Rudolf Strobl}