Lucas Pérez is an artist and calligrapher who examines concepts around practice in his painting, video, and performance works.

2017 MFA Fine Art Thesis Walkthrough- Lucas Perez from Parsons Art, Media & Technology on Vimeo.

In March of 2017, after seven years of testing, I became a Shihan, or Master-Teacher in the Shosenbu Calligraphy group of Nagoya, Japan. When I started studying calligraphy, I wondered how many practice sheets it would take to become master. Could I fit them all on a single table? I collected them for eight years and it turns out that I could; I could fit “mastery” on a table. Afterward, I felt the need to become blank: to disappear my earlier writings: to start over. In the video entitled: “Throwing away eight years of calligraphy” (2017) you see me putting these practice sheets down the trash shoot of my building.

I wanted to find a single “imperfect” mark that could express the blankness of mastery I had discovered by disposing of this past. I found the mark in a single horizontal calligraphic stroke written in a queer neon color. It’s the glyph for the unification of my practice, but it’s also a bold proclamation of an idealogical descent from the history of calligraphy.
The work consists of two parts: the video of me throwing away my practice sheets, displayed on an iPad; and “The blankness of mastery” mark in Day-Glo pigment and deerskin glue on an antique silver-leafed six-panel folding screen (c. 1950).