Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending, Mary Ann Evans wrote. Beginnings as endings and endings as beginnings ◯. Makes me think of horizons; that apparent curve of the earth we can view from places far away enough– the limit of the world. In Greek, the word horizon means separating circle, which I get, because although it is that stare-spot we so happily idle at, even meditate on, the horizon is essentially a line spinning us from today into tomorrow; the meeting of a beginning and end. Sun sets, sun rises. Earth spins. Listening to Erik Satie on loop, thinking about why good things have to end, there's something in the dun dun dun, belemp belemp of Satie’s sideways compositions that hurl me into understanding that good things don't end, they carry on ◒.

Since October last year, I’ve been holding Lucas’ latest work in my mind. It has accompanied me at dinners, seen me through weathers, and diffused fiery emotional exhalations. The last time we spoke I asked him what he’d been up to? A soft question to ask someone who had spent the last 5 years teetering on the edge of his limits. I’m letting go of everything, he said. 5 words. 5 massive words. The feeling was belemp belemp. It was clear I had no idea how to live as he did. Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts, wrote Rachel Carson in Silent Spring. Having spied the other side of life, Lucas has endured losses and found rituals to celebrate those losses through an other-worldly knowledge of life: one we are all connected in ◓. I think that's why Lucas’ body of work feels like the body it came out of– resolute commingling of weighty moments, married together to make a whole. He is us and we are him. The process of Lucas’ image making feels intuitively saṃsāric; honing snippets from idols, photographing them together, then exhaling them via a printer–everything that has moved him, made him, broken him, understood him, nourished him in plain sight. These things have lived inside of him, and now us too.

This beauty will continue, and this beauty will flourish whether we behold it not, wrote Virginia Woolf. She was discussing human nature, humans in nature, the nature of humans. When I think of nature, one question comes to mind: will I ever know tomorrow as well as I know today? Nature teaches us, without ever thinking of us, that it continues, it prevails; It removes us from the pettiness of existing in tomorrow and nestles us in bodiless thoughts, ambient in temperature, here in today ◐. Lucas reminded me that nothing is exempt from this type of loving and longing felt when immersed in nature; that although a flower in the field perishes in an evening wind, it does not perish forever, but will revive beneath an even brighter sky tomorrow. Even though the world feels slippery, and we’re flooded by time, beauty will continue.

Standing in Lucas’ work feels fertilised with a knowing I do not have. Maybe I don't know the strange hours of the night like he does, or maybe I just don’t know how turbulent humanity really is. With horizon lines for every size, in every shade of the past possible, I wrote in my notes, being here tells me that no one stands still enough. Albert Camus declared he had an invincible summer inside him, even in winter. I think Lucas must too ◑. There is an end, but a beginning on the horizon: a grand cyclic reminder to give ourselves whole-heartedly to the experienced world: as Carson put it, The assurance that dawn comes after night, spring after winter. Yesterday is feeding tomorrow, but for today, be still. To me, Lucas has a sense of the evanescent nature of the self, of the joust between surface and depth, of inner life and outer life, where we see him not imitating it, but rather finding an equivalent to it. Something that can only arise in stillness, deep from within.

Satie aimed to create atmosphere rather than an emotional journey in his compositions; to reduce music to a backdrop, to see it as a framed object; to flatten the musical space, reducing it to emotion through colours alone and to celebrate repetition. Having played Satie on loop since starting to write this, I now know what Lucas meant when he said Satie helped soothe broken moments– I felt the same way when I looked into one of his horizons. In a way, Satie’s musical aesthetic could be perceived on a common ground with Lucas’ work. Dun dun dun, belemp, belemp, staring into the colours, freed from my perishable, physical reality, I’m shot onto the line separating Lucas’ circle. I’m reminded that while learning to live– love, loss, escape, the lust for understanding the unhurried rhythm of the natural world– on we must go, up we must get. Life is a full circle, learn to let it go. ⬤