Robert Lucander

This well-designed, staple-bound exhibition catalogue features ample full-page illustrations and a paper change for the text and interview. It's a great format for the visual inventions of the Helsinki-born painter Robert Lucander, who draws his imagery from records, magazines and film--and here also from old books on wizardry and classic Modernist works by artists like Max Ernst or Edvard Munch.

Finnish artist Robert Lucander, who investigates the interplay between painting and photography, selects his source snapshots and portraits from magazines, cheap novels, books and album covers. His figures are traced and shaded in pencil on wood, where he uses the grain to suggest depth. They are then framed in richly contrasting solid, unshaded enamel, so that a flat blue silhouette of a model's tousled hair frames his face precisely drawn over the wood grain, or a pair of carefully penciled arms are crossed upon a flat cerulean blue background. Of his practice he says, "I use industrially manufactured acrylic paint without experimenting, I just follow the instructions on the tin." Cocktail International encompasses works dating from 1989 to 2005, from Lucander's early abstract phase through those signature wooden panel paintings to his latest watercolors.