Lucketti, Astrid

A soul for a muse

"I never wanted to be an artist, but it is the greatest gift that life has given me. I want my art to do good, and I spend my time longing for the beautiful. It has become an obsession!”

About 80% of our paths in life are shaped by the unconscious. Born in 1986, French artist Astrid Lucketti has always taken great care and focus on her feelings, intuitions, and dreams. Her fascination with nature – one of her biggest inspirations – has never ceased to amaze her. "The human being does not really understand what happens to them by being human. That's why they need to decipher everything," says the woman for whom academia is often too boring. As a young adult, she chose to study architecture and design, preferring instinct to thought. Coming from an artistic family background, and as a result of her life experiences, Astrid Lucketti asked herself what was essential to her. This is how she decided to embrace the wonderous world in her own right.

Interlocking

Astrid Lucketti set out to meet herself, to meet the child she once was, and to fully encompass her talents as an artist. The art she creates is multi-faceted, working within the realms of painting, sculpture, tattooing, photography and street art. Inspired by dreams of escape, her work explores themes of energy, light, fluids, the omnipresent duality of the world, spirituality and, perhaps most important of all, the notion of freedom. Gold and black are the artist's driving colours, acting as symbols of light on the one hand and the unknown on the other. White, which is also found often in Astrid's work, carries innocence and wisdom. Blue, the fourth most prominent colour, is a promise of truth. Many of the artist's works have no name. Why would she lock them up even more? "It is difficult for me to name; it does not amuse me. To add a name is like categorizing something in a particular box.” Astrid would say that we as people are drawn to fitting in, and that we need to. School, company, family, country, language... Our freedom is enclosure: the body, breathing and the very nature of life, our passage on Earth as a soul. Thus, "I prefer to let people name my works themselves. I love to watch and listen to them read my works according to their point of view, and their own imagination.

The time of perspective

The notion of viewpoints, positions and actions are an integral part of Astrid Lucketti's work. According to the artist, they are directly correlated with our way of being. This is why she works on her creations in three ways. Lucketti contemplates the beauty that surrounds us. Through photographic art, she captures the movement and the fleeting, ephemeral moment. Through her pictorial works in the studio, she creates movement. On the floor, her main tools are silver spoons and her hands to feel the materials: paint, cardboard, paper, metal or wood. Cardboard, a recycled material, represents the passing of time: "It's as if I were painting on a bookcase," she smiles. The changes in the shape of the material by the paint (undulations), punctuated by numerous drying phases between the different layers, correspond to the evolution of the human being. For her street art work, Lucketti considers the spray paint can – her favourite tool – as a metaphor for the breath of life.
According to the artist, it is essential to look, see, perceive and encounter one's own ambivalences in order to live and to consciously savour the riches that surround us.

Intuition Manifesto

The artist has a joyful self-understanding, and her soul is her muse. She would tell you that she is a soul-user, because art is a direct access to the source of intuition. When she creates, Lucketti can reach other states of consciousness. For weeks, her works develop in her unconscious. The days before the idea is born, it swarms and bubbles. Then suddenly, it lets go and the intuition gushes. "I don't think, I go by instinct", she says. Music plays and in a meditative, almost hypnotic trance, the artist allows this new state of consciousness to take hold, painting the energy that animates us.
In her alchemic quest for the divine, she also learned to work outdoors: "I need large spaces. With these new constraints, I discovered another freedom".
In front of a work by Yves Klein, the artist stops in amazement: "His works allow me to be still.” Endowed with a keen perception, her gaze becomes still. She appreciates the detail and, in a certain form of constant plenitude, understands that beauty is everywhere. Artists often have this ability to perceive the reality of the world in a non-intellectual way, which they convey in their art by offering messages and allowing access to a different state of consciousness. The spectator, then touched by the work, will be able to perceive this reality, understand it and make it their own, until they feel a form of truth.
Astrid Lucketti offers a unique journey to her luminous universe.