We are entering an era when expression can be more participatory and alive. We have the opportunity to distribute and experience rich sensory signals in ways that are different from looking at the page of a book and more accessible than travelling to the Louvre. Artists will come to see the Internet as the world's largest gallery for their expressions and as a means of disseminating them directly to people.
Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital, 1996
The first stop is Lucero's 'Shard Series'. During this early period Lucero made composite sculptures using hundreds of thin, hand-made tiles which were attached to wire frames. Often these would be human figures, but sometimes animal forms, such as the depicted work 'Untitled (Hanging Form)'. Already in these early works, one can see combinations of human/animal, culture/nature, architecture/organism that have remained an element in Lucero's subsequent work.
In the next 'Dreamer' series, we are presented with Pink Nude Dreamer, which consists of the head form that Lucero repeatedly uses for this series. It is decorated with a range of painted scenes reflecting Lucero's early undergraduate training in painting at Humboldt State University in California. Employing painted underglazes and sgraffito on a shape that doesn't directly relate to the imagery, we see typical painterly elements of Lucero's work that he has become so well known for. One cannot but help getting a distinct feeling of surrealism here. The fantastic images the Lucero paints on his forms seem to spring from the sub-conscious and speak to sub-conscious strands of the viewers mind.
Lucero's interest in the Native American Pueblo dates back to his childhood travels from California to relatives in New Mexico. Here he would come into contact with American Natives and their culture. Native American rugs, jewellery, sculpture and ceramics would come to influence Lucero in his later life. The Californian and New Mexican environment also supplied the artist with a rich abundance of animal life, especially reptiles and amphibians that he loved as a child and employed in his imagery later in life.
This is especially the case in his 'Earth Images' installation, excerpts of which we can see on the 'Earth Images' pages. Here we are presented with the 'Hercules Beetle' of 1986. The fantastic, upright beetle is distorted and again surreal, painted with images of trees on the one hand and m�ro-like colour fields on the other. Here, nature and culture collide. A closer inspection of the head reveals a pale, haunting ghost-like figure and scenery, perhaps suggesting stories of Native American medicine men or their peoples beliefs. The overall effect is one of a bio-morphic enigma of disparate elements that nonetheless has a naturalness about it.
Lucero pays homage to the pueblo in his 'Pre-Columbus' series, which consists of distorted seated figures, glazed in bright colours and painted with environmental scenes juxtaposed with screaming heads and pueblo pottery -pre-columbian art contrasts with classical and modern painting traditions. The bar code and the tea-pot create a reference to the modern world and in a sense pre-empt Lucero's next series, the 'New World' series, which deals with the radical changes Columbus' discovery of the New World inflicted on the continent.
In the last series, the 'Reclamation' series the artist has incorporated his love of collecting antiques and novelties into his art work. As can be seen on the homepage with the work 'Conquistador', Lucero has taken 'found' objects and added to them, creating totally new and compelling works. The 'Reclamation Series' page shows the work Angola Carolina which consists of a head in the form of a keg with a large painted beetle as nose. This piece is reminiscent of the work of American ceramic artist George Ohr (1857-1918) whose work Lucero admires and collects fervently.
The Lucero site is visually elegant and easy to navigate. The viewer is presented with a representative cross-section of the artist's sculptures and the text offered along with the images is restrained enough, so it does not constitute 'information overload'. This site is a great introduction to Lucero's life work.