TRAVEL SKETCHES FROM ELSEWHERE AND NOWHERE STEIL, LUCIEN

Antología recopilatoria de los cuadernos de trabajo, dibujo y ensoñaciones del arquitecto Lucien Steil.

Just like in the Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Lucien Steil’s miniature Capricci are not mimetic sketches of a singular object but sublime agglomerations of detached images and metaphysical recollections of his memories of place, space, and time. His are not paintings but painted-drawings. His imaginary universe is represented through a collection of ideal archetypes; archetypes which make us feel at ease with their unique degree of inventiveness and yet with their strange sense of familiarity. A fragmented collection of landscapes, plazas, streets, civic and domestic buildings, towers, roofs, porches, arcades, balconies, rooms, windows, etc. constitute the repertoire of his location-neutral places; his fictional images portray spaces that do not exist today; nevertheless, at a simple glance, his places could very well occupy an existing reality in some sort of parallel universe; these are places we’ve never visited and yet spaces which, with their materiality and familiar characteristics, stir our imagination toward new moral and ethical values.

Jaime Correa