In 1981, Douglas Welch wrote the first article published on Lasker, a one-page essay in the January issue of
Arts Magazine, in anticipation of Lasker's debut solo exhibition opening that month at the Landmark Gallery. The first critical study of Lasker was
David Carrier's "Painting into Depth: Jonathan Lasker's Recent Art", published in the January 1985 issue of Arts, and the question of Lasker's content was already a topic of debate saying, "Some abstract paintings look portrait-like, while many others are landscapes of the mind; Lasker's suggest, rather, a man-made space, a proscenium in which his shapes and drawings are to be placed." Five years later, the art historian and critic Joseph Masheck also makes a different connection to theater in "Painting in Double Negative: Jonathan Lasker", in which he rejects facile associations with the concepts of
simulacra and simulation, or, as he put it, "the cult of
Baudrillard," and instead projects Lasker's painting through the lens of
Antonin Artaud's The Theater and Its Double (1938): It cannot have escaped Lasker that his own work, however, smart, is much less simplistic and shows rather less 'attitude' than fashion dictates. He seems to paint out of suave disgust for the pseudo-radical philistines' antipathy toward painting. Thus I see his work not as an empty, ill-defined 'double' for painting, that is, as part of the current bourgeois anti-art voodoo, but as a true treble to that false double. The critic
Barry Schwabsky, in his reading of Lasker's work, adds another layer of complexity, that of an ambiguous relationship to metaphor within Lasker's central focus on paint-as-paint. In a review of a solo exhibition at the
Rose Museum of Brandeis University, he writes: Jonathan Lasker once told me he thought the Minimalists had been trying to make an art without metaphor, and in fact had succeeded; but the point having been proved, he continued, there's no longer an urgent motivation to produce more metaphor-free work. But neither, I would add, is there any special reason to create metaphor-laden art—that is, unless the metaphors carry conviction. Lasker's paintings puzzle over precisely this question: what's credible in painting, for now, and why. Art critic
Demetrio Paparoni addresses the subject of Lasker and metaphor in the essay "An Abstract Logo for Democracy in Art": In contrast to Mondrian, [Lasker] does not desire the painting to be an object in itself and, in order to leave space for metaphor, confers subjective value on color. Most importantly, he considers the creative thought process behind the work and the sentiment that animates his formal choices of equivalent import. The critic and historian
Robert Hughes posted a review on Artslant of Lasker's solo exhibition at
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris, in which he rejects the idea that Lasker's work is about anything other than its formal properties: Lasker explores the inflections, the innuendoes of hues and geometric forms that represent themselves rather than convey meaning for representing something else. These are works that simply ask us to see. By reducing (or, perhaps, ennobling) a form to its basics – a gray rectangle, perhaps, that glows on a graph grid – then placing beside it a similar but altered shape whose bold colors give it recrudescent life, Lasker wants us to look at what we ignore, or to imagine what we suppress. These are joyous, reasoned, passionate works. They trace moods through something indecipherable – they are, after all, abstractions – but Lasker has a way of anchoring us to them. Sight made tactile, thought made figurative. ==Solo exhibitions==