Liliane Tomasko

These most recent paintings of Liliane Tomasko present abstraction as a conduit for self-reflexivity. Upon color-drenched surfaces, raw traces of paint and concealed brushwork give rise to visual spaces wherein maelstroms of undulating bands and illuminated forms incite yet halt recognizable imagery. Painted wet-into-wet, free-floating marks give way to veiled and unstructured masses poised in space. Translucence and opacity meld into one another. Gesturally executed contours intertwine within unfathomable pictorial spaces, where form and formlessness restrain the gestalt. This suspension of the legibility of forms redirects the abstraction of the paintings from their self-containment to the ontology of visual perception, where figuration and abstraction coexist within sight, reveries, and dreams. Titled Shifting Shapes as a group, these hauntingly lyrical works of Tomasko caress the interstices of vision, echoing the thoughts of Maurice Merleau-Ponty: “‘Nature is on the inside,’ says Cézanne. Quality, light, color, depth, which are there before us, are there only because they awaken an echo in our body and because the body welcomes them.” These paintings of Tomasko reveal themselves as windows to a primordial world that is in an interminable process of entering our awareness.

Portrait of the Self, the inaugural solo exhibition of Liliane Tomasko at Nino Mier Gallery in Los Angeles, comprises an absorbing suite of large-scale paintings and works on paper that embody webs of virtuosic gestural brushwork rendered in an expansive range of crepuscular and vibrant hues. An assured compositional dynamic prevails these airy, painterly and lyrical abstractions executed by means of the graceful spontaneity of the artist’s hand. Through the medium of acrylic and acrylic spray, Tomasko has transformed planar surfaces into illusive spaces replete with chromatic translucence, chance and volatility.

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For Liliane Tomasko, the subjects of memory, dream, and reverie, which have deep roots in her slow, intimately made vignettes of domestic spaces eventually transpired to the synthesis of light and space of the mind, and of nature illuminated from within. Although there were evidences tracing from such slow movements of objects depicted in the once given and familiar domestic settings, to swift deviations of wind, air, and color of the outdoor, what Liliane has been undertaking in her new pictorial pursuit is evidenced in her recent exhibit Name Me Not at Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos (CAB) in Spain.

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Liliane Tomasko employs a very different way of reflecting the inside of ourselves in what she calls the “record of a visceral subjectivity.” “The subconscious is an unstable beast, and does not want to be reasoned or conquered.” The night emerges as a pictorial territory crossed by a misshapen magma. Beneath the surface of the tangible world “we know that there is something else, a dark matter that shapes our lives and our actions, our interactions with the world we live in,” the author tells us. 

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