JONATHAN LASKER:  Expressions Become Things –
From Sketch to Study to Painting
by Richard Milazzo.

First edition hardback:  September 2005.
Designed by Richard Milazzo.
88 pages, with a 4-colour gatefold jacket, a black and white photograph of the artist by the author on the frontispiece, 13 color reproductions.
13 x 9.25 x .5 in., printed, sewn, and bound in Turin, Italy.
ISBN:  1-893207-15-3.
New York - Paris - Turin:  Edgewise Press, 2005.

RETAIL PRICE: $45.00 (includes postage and handling)

Jonathan Lasker:  Expressions Become Things by Richard Milazzo is the first book to analyze the role of the sketch in the artist’s work.  Preliminary even to the small studies, the sketches are the stage in which Jonathan Lasker works out his initial ideas for a painting.  Even before making the study or studies that precede the painting, the artist sketches out the most rudimentary of forms and colors, often making the most radical of changes in the process of arriving at the image that will become the final painting.

In observing as we do in this book the evolution of the eleven sketches, we see, as it were, the artist’s mind at work.  In his essay, the author also analyzes the distinct relation of the sketches to the single study and their relation to the painting, Expressions Become Things, all executed in 2000.  The eleven sketches, the study, and the final painting are all reproduced in color.

Reminiscent of the seminal volume, Jonathan Lasker:  A Conversation with Collins & Milazzo and 13 Studies for a Painting Entitled “Cultural Promiscuity,” published by Gian Enzo Sperone in Rome in 1987, which could also be used to understand the artist’s work in general, Richard Milazzo’s Jonathan Lasker:  Expressions Become Things is an instrument created specifically to closely scrutinize not only the working process but the act of conception or origination in a work of art.

Jonathan Lasker is generally considered to be one of the most important artists to emerge from the 1980s.  His work has been critical to the development of American abstract painting over the course of nearly two decades.  Through the author’s essay and the artist’s pictures, we can trace, step by step, the aesthetic and material procedures that continue to make Lasker’s work central to the discourse on abstract painting in the new millennium.

A special deluxe boxed set, in an edition of 25, with 5 artist’s proofs, has been produced to celebrate the publication of this book.  It contains a signed and numbered copy of the book and four actual-size prints based on the sketches.  This deluxe edition has been designed by Richard Milazzo, and is published by Edgewise Press, Inc., New York, and Paolo Torti degli Alberti, Turin.