Often Pukac starts a piece during a live painting session and completes the work at home to achieve “gallery quality.” All photos by Breanne Lynn Patterson.
“Have you ever been to Mardi Gras?” asked painter Michael Pukac. “It is an exhibitionist thing. It makes people more human. They are less concerned about the rules or what is proper or politically correct. It takes away a little bit of the puritanical shell.”
Mardi Gras is a bacchanal-like celebration that takes place prior to the arrival of the disciplined religious season of Lent. Does participating in Mardi Gras (or Burning Man or Coachella for that matter) decontaminate our perspective and prepare us for a life of greater balance? Like the festival environment, the admiration of certain types of art can be transformative—a cathartic vehicle that jars us out of our mental routine.
Mardi Gras functions as a metaphor for the artistic practice of Michael Pukac. Pukac’s recent large-scale acrylic canvasses have an exhibitionist quality, not only in terms of subject matter, but style. He combines absurd subject matter and ironic situations to create a fantasy for the viewer.
Inspired by the Baroque period in art, Pukac distorts natural spatial relationships. He exaggerates the scale of the figure and its depiction in space. Each composition is chocked full of decorative elements including: styled lettering, repeated geometric patterns, and gotti impressions of gold leaf.
In “Have it All,” Marie Antoinette dons a cake tutu—jewel encrusted letters reference her infamous statement: “Let them eat cake.” Rather than demonize Antoinette for her lavish lifestyle at the expense of the French proletariat, Pukac embraces the Mardi Gras-like gluttony that eventually led to Antoinette’s downfall. Put into a contemporary context, “Have it All” is a fitting mantra for our fast-paced, over-consumerist American lifestyle.
Like his choice of subject matter and style, his artistic process is liberal and spontaneous. He opts for painting directly on the canvas instead of conforming to the boundaries of a pre-established sketch. Pukac works exclusively in acrylic, which according to him is, “often dismissed for its flat, cheap qualities,” but is in fact, “the paint of our time,” (in contrast to oil). Pukac works on paintings in a succession, shifting from one painting to the next to counteract stale creativity.
“Painting is a religion. I look to it for the bigger meanings in life. It is the last bastion of alchemy,” he says.
Acrylic dries quickly, an important factor when working within a time constraint. Pukac’s choice of materials is perhaps pragmatic and essential to his practice of live painting. He often collaborates with musical acts such as Jurassic 5 and Bittersweet to create a total environment. That which he does not complete, he brings home and re-works until he achieves gallery-quality work.
In the French Academy large-scale history painting was at the top of the hierarchy of genres—it was the epitome of fine art, and a vehicle to communicate broad themes of liberty, sacrifice, bravery and defeat. Pukac’s eroticized images and whimsical breed of historical revisionism are a subversive update to this tradition. Radiant color combinations, curvilinear lines and repeating patterns are combined with humor and accessible subject matter and text, such as vernacular phrases and historical figures from pop culture and history. His is a populist aesthetic—conceived according to the artist, “to appeal to viewers without a master’s degree.”
Sounds like a party—yet, I am not sure if I am having fun. Pukac’s repeated use of the naked female figure as the central compositional element facilitates an experience for me as a woman that is not particularly inviting, and at times profoundly troubling.
Pukac’s appropriation and de-robing of historical heroines such as Amelia Earhart, relates back to my initial discussion about our attachment to festivals. The transitory nature of these ephemeral environments, create a separate barometer for appropriate social behavior. Luring the audience into the venue with a promise of respite from their present selves, these environments are seemingly appealing.
Similarly, Pukac’s canvases seduce the viewer into lingering for the sake of visual pleasure. What is yet to be resolved for this viewer is whether the experience with Pukac’s work is a transitory, erotic escape, and a liberation from our regimented human existence? Or does it merely re-stage the antiquated and all too familiar masquerade in the history of art, that is—the male painter’s appropriation of the female form for commercial purposes?
Pukac will be exhibiting his work Friday, February 1 at a pop-up event with Mardi Gras-inspired “second line beats” by Toaster Music at 3846 Atlantic Avenue in Bixby Knolls.
Second Photo: In “Have it All,” a decedent woman peaks through gold encrusted lettering complete with décolletage.
Third Photo: Michael Pukac at his studio home in Long Beach