Flea - earth images

Among the many bodies of work created by Lucero in the 1980's, his most subtle were his "bug and fish" series from the mid 1980's. Taking the form of an actual creature and surfacing it with his amazing matte glazed imagery and then surrounding the edge of the creature with black, these works, mainly exhibited at the Everson Museum in Syracuse New York have a classicism that overwhelmed the viewer. This piece is a prime example of that body of work that would never be repeated as the years went on. Lucero’s “Bug & Fish” series of the 1980s takes the specific creature — formalised in clay — and projects subtle or detailed matte glaze miniatures along its surface in a lively combination of sculptural and figurative painting. The results of this process graduate to become more authoritatively lucid and surreal as multiple surfaces and increasingly alien forms are rendered, but “Flea” still holds a tactile and inquisitive delight in its relative simplicity and vestige of truth to nature in each separate element, the painting rather elegantly framed by the thorax of the insect.