DIKI LUCKERSON LYCHEE FROM A POISONOUS TREE AUGUST 4–SEPTEMBER 1 What does it mean to make a painting that beckons to be licked? A painting that seduces not with its nutritional or intellectual value, but with its toxicity. A painting that contains the ingestible tickets to a psychoactive carnival where every ride runs on maximum overdrive, turbocharged to such a capacity that the flimsy screws holding them in place begin to loosen, bend, and snap, flailing with an unhinged centrifugal vigor that yanks the viewer towards the banks of annihilation. Enter stage left Diki Luckerson, a painter whose hyperchromatic infantilisms piss on the art world’s puritanical pruning, boring holes of repressed baseness into the canvas and planting seeds for some nondescript truth of life to grow in its wildest, most depraved combinations. In her spiritual and artistic practice, Luckerson has embarked on a quest to forage for pits. As a second-level student of Prana Nadi, her hands, joints, and muscles have wired themselves into the interplanar superhighway of energy, empowering her paint with an intuitive dynamism that, rather than burying itself in abstract expressionism’s (“bro shit”) gestural grandeur, feeds on figuration. With the elements as her automatist collaborators (she often paints and stores her unrolled canvases on the roof, rain or shine), she allows smears and subjects to guide her towards a sludge of spontaneous psychical imagery, a rotting and regenerating flesh that congeals around a pit of something forbidden, admissible to the psyche only in these imagistic distortions. Luckerson paints smorgasbords of forms and suggestions where perspective, proportion, and any semblance of planning submits to ripples of destabilizing obliqueness. Decapitated nude bodies covered in slimy eggs, apparitions, teddy bear specters, and screaming children form deformed, off-kilter, stretched, and contorted psyche-scapes that seem fixed in centripetal swirls, simultaneously spewing from and yanked into a gravitational system of self-occluding seeds. A more tangible example is the restless armchair grandmother, warped checkerboard floor, and childlike drawing of either a donkey or Baphomet wearing a Denver-Colorado-forward beanie in “Two Cars,” which all erupted from Luckerson placing her palm into the canvas and outlining her hand; she exchanged this physical silhouette for a spiral of imagery, unraveling itself on the canvas as it surveys and traces the topography of her imagination that, in its irrational spontaneity, orbits the inadmissible. In feasting on a Luckerson, the roles of consumer and consumed flip, and with every bite we take from her acidic scramblings of mental sewage, we are chewed up and spit out reborn. She suggests sites of psychical rifts and sucks us in with an unassuming innocence, stripping us bare to shed light on an internal poisonous tree that reveals itself only when we cannot see it. These works dwarf us not by building an impenetrable barrier of conceptualism or commanding the pious worship of “She who has Superior Technique,” but by feeding us with a hand that bites back, allowing us to suckle on a mind-bending fruit that holds within it the pulse of a beautiful wretchedness.