The Pull Towards Play is a series of short portraits of real tennis players from around the world. Not professionals. Just people who keep showing up, for reasons that are hard to name and impossible to ignore.
MRKA, MADRID
His father is his favourite player. Not Federer. Not Nadal. His father. That is where tennis began for Lucas, on a court somewhere in Madrid, watching the person he admires most move across it. The game came to him the way the most important things do. Through someone you love before you understand why.
MRKA is the name he goes by. His work lives at the intersection of tennis, design, typography, and a kind of visual intelligence that doesn’t sit comfortably in any single category. He hand paints distorted court markings. He designs non-fictional tournament graphics. He builds entire worlds around the game: objects, visors, grips, sweaters, things that feel less like products and more like artefacts from a universe that runs parallel to professional tennis but operates by completely different rules.
The most talked about of these worlds is Hard Court, an immersive installation at Casa Axis in Valencia commissioned by Felipe Pantone. MRKA painted the tennis court by hand, distorting the lines, breaking the geometry, turning infrastructure into art. Parts of it he drew with his non-dominant hand deliberately. He wanted the lines to stay imperfect. He wanted the immediacy. He understood that control, taken too far, kills the thing you are trying to make.
‘Tennis High’ is what he calls the moment on court when everything clicks. You are suddenly hypnotised by a good ball exchange. The thinking stops. Something else takes over.
He keeps playing despite tendonitis in his right hand. He keeps playing the way anyone keeps doing the thing that chose them before they chose it.
Tennis saved his life.
He doesn’t explain that. He doesn’t need to.
Enough to be on court again tomorrow.