VII

A young man leaves the table and walks on the wall surrounding the property. The character lives in a tree. The sun is shining—it is our imagination—we can hear the leaves frolicking in the summer. One day, we will touch ground.

VIII

Light is often an element of the piece. Thus emerges the glass marble, the crest of a bottle-shaped sculpture carved from what remains of a tree brought down by a storm. The ash wood unfolds this way: smooth, sinewy, a sharp beak, a pincer; it entwines mirror, entwines copper, entwines circle, repeating itself to infinity. The hand sees that the other beak has relief, rich and soft this time. It is an upside-down house, an invitation to dial a number, the effect of absence, inversions made upon the retina.

IX

Colors, when they invite themselves in, are rich and full like nature, primary like in school. Otherwise, they point back to matter that weighs and measures, the kind from which jewelry and crowns are made—outer signs: pieces and structures.

X

The vanity of the gesture, always: a challenge thrown at time. Things taken from the world arrange themselves—precarious, grave. Some bend. Some break. Everything is understood. Take the example of a majestic Asian hornet’s nest gathered twelve meters above the ground, falling into fraternal arms that restrain it while saving it, giving it a new impression, distorting it. The sum: twelve meters from the ground, fraternal arms, structure, grid, animal architecture, shock, danger—forbidden, because the law says it must not be kept. Enter: the necessity of bronze as a reaction. Exit: sculpture.

XI

I’m the king of the castle, and you’re the dirty rascal. For a long time, changes in elevation were used to communicate over great distances. Luke James’s pieces speak of scales, ranks, and reversals. They refer to the collective unconscious, to the image, to false pretenses. The fortified castle is visible, but its primary function is negative, since it is the one that sees, and its walls, its loopholes, have a warring function. When lands are threatened, this function sometimes merges with that of hospitality, as all the people of the land come into its bosom.

XII

Another gesture: striking the center of the glass pane with a foot to make a sunburst of cracks emerge. Sometimes: the sun compresses into a circle, pure as a bubble or the center of the universe. Gesture: assembling the sheet metal into the shape of a house, sharp, pronounced angles. A taut box, sharp yet hospitable. Dropping it, seeing the Middle Ages and its fool emerge from it. Gesture: das Haus vom Nikolausconsists of drawing a house, or an envelope, without lifting the pencil. Starting from the bottom right corner, there are 44 ways to draw the envelope and only 10 ways to "lose." By symmetry, the number of possibilities starting from the bottom left corner is identical.

XIII

The work includes: the spectator is often reflected. The contingency of glass and mirror, the artist's playfulness, the condition of seeing. Glass bottles repeat themselves, recalling true false twins, or a child who, acting as a lookout, observes the sea horizon from an imagined boat. With Luke James, the artwork can be a gesture (throwing coins on the ground as one would into a fountain, jumping into piles of flour, placing a pin on a terracotta floor tile, a card between two windowpanes) or a feat (it is out of necessity, and since childhood, that wood, stone, and glass have been mastered).

XIV

Volume exists outside of itself. Physically impossible to grasp in its entirety, it is simultaneously its own reverse side and its cast shadow. Tangible, increasingly massive, Luke James’s sculptures are dense elements and projections: light, landscape—moving to meet their surroundings.

XV

What must be understood about the work is that, being open, it accepts the weight of whatever passes through it without trying to control it. A bird? Yes. A geometric shape? Yes. A point? Yes. A riddle, but of the Cheshire Cat variety.

XVI

Slack water (that brief moment when the sea is still between two tides): often a piece is time and space flipped back on themselves—inside out, but not quite. For it is not so much a matter of searching for a marrow, a contingency, as it is of unfolding reality. A branch, whether bramble or rosebush, has a circumference—when I roll it on the earth, I capture its imprint without its relief. Yet its thorns still punctuate my surface, offering themselves to be read. The rose may be red or white; the internal wars of our roots remain unresolved. Slack water: the crown returns, Merovingian in style. An echo—the artist is no Historian.

XVII

The studio space: works like a population, like sentinels. A life is not over; it displaces itself. Every gesture: pending. Narrative and symbolism may drive the gesture, but they are not its reason.

XVIII

Often, the artist quotes the way one summons an entity. Reappropriating the words of another the way one wears their clothes—to test them, to confront the body with a different system of gestures.

XIX

A form is a form is a form. A bottle—there are many of them, they can be repeated. A bottle carved from light wood is a form, a chromatic play, a variation. The work suggests, searches within suggestion. Coleridge called it the "willing suspension of disbelief." One only needs to remember: the joys of letting go. Like a novel, you settle into it. Like a novel, you make it your own.

XX

Everything belongs to eternity.

XXI

Finally, a whole company. Finally, the circumference. Finally, the depth. And the path: between a teeming imagination, a capable hand, a pedestal, and the potentials of matter. This morning, a suit of armor made of lead turned inside out before my eyes, and I remembered that schoolyard game of turning your eyelids inside out to scare each other, and I remembered, too, the immensity