WHITEHOT MAGAZINE

The grand pronouncements about the “death of modernism” are, by now, cliché. Reports of its demise have been greatly exaggerated, and critics still debate its boundaries and legacy. But what is undeniable is that the modernist project—the heroic pursuit of progress and the shock of the new—has, for many, run its course. So, what happens to painting after the exhaustion of that project?

My recent engagement with such a question began not in a gallery, but in a swaying gondola high above the Feast of San Gennaro in Little Italy in mid-September. From the Ferris wheel, I witnessed the bizarre juxtaposition of a temporary carnival, catching fleeting glimpses into strangers’ apartments as I spun above the crowd. That bizarre feeling—of being suspended between spectacle and intimacy, the temporal and the enduring—refused to fade. With its own mix of danger and anxiety, George Michael's track “Spinning the Wheel” came to mind—the soundtrack to a modern kind of roulette, where the thrill of the spin was inseparable from its consequences.

It is a sensation, I found, that resonates inherently with Liliane Tomasko’s work, providing a compelling case study for the very question of what happens to painting after the modernist project has run its course. Her paintings, like that vertiginous ascent, offer a powerful commentary on the state of abstraction today—an art form that must contend not only with its own history but with the all-pervasive reality of a digital world.

With seemingly automated and indexical traces evoking fragmented figures—hands, heads, water, and sky—Tomasko’s painting entitled POEM THING (not quite so surely pledging the eternal as that which grows star each night and climbs) moves beyond mere abstraction to deploy an unprocessed visual vocabulary. Here raw pigments explode across the canvas, where cadmium reds bleed into amaranth pink, outlining phantom limbs and swirling celestial bodies with a vibrant, almost visceral immediacy. Apparitions of a hand in peach beige and a head in laurel green manifest cumulations of express brushstrokes. This palpable presence of the mediums of acrylic and spray, far from signaling a “demise,” instead asserts painting’s enduring capacity for emotive gesture and a substantive engagement with its own materiality.

With a palette that seems to have been purloined from Arshile Gorky’s 1936-37 Painting of the Whitney Museum, Tomasko's POEM THING (so that it, now bound in and now embracing, grows alternately stone in you and star) manifests a head-on collision of styles and context. In this painting, the here-and-now relegates moments of now-and-then. The ribbon-like fluidity of smears of fair red are enmeshed with the coolness of stark bands of ecru cream and the pure flatness of unblended pink. If shades of pistachio evoke water, this brings to mind the words of Henri Matisse: “A color for me is a force. My paintings consist of four or five colors which clash with one another expressively. When I apply green, that does not mean grass. When I apply blue, that does not mean sky.” (1)

In the painting POEM THING (you watch: and the lands divide from you), Tomasko grapples with the inherent subjectivity and limitations of human perception. The singular canvas registers this metaphysical problem through its materiality: not as a triumphant image of celestial majesty but as a fragmented field, as if seen through a faulty lens or from within a confined space of knowledge. The swirling chromaticism of iridescent hues and slender lines of spray appear not as a map of the heavens but as a visual pandemonium that reflects the limits of our sensory awareness. While cosmology may describe “edges” through the concept of black holes, such a theoretical construct remains beyond humanity's grasp. We are bound, ultimately, by the tools of our own apperception. Throughout the picture surface, disciplined torrents of paint clash with ethereal, deep-space washes of color. The result recalls the cerebral dilemmas in our attempt to comprehend the infinite. The painting enacts our Kafkaesque struggle to perceive the world through our inadequate means. It performs its operations through ceaseless painterly gestures that reckon with the tools of human perception. Tomasko’s image thus manifests a material register of mankind’s metaphysical quandary.

The diptych POEM THING (Slowly the evening puts on the garments held for it by a rim of ancient trees) acutely embodies the struggle to reckon with abstraction's history rather than simply overcoming it. On a split canvas, Tomasko orchestrates a material Aufhebung, the Hegelian process of simultaneously abolishing, preserving, and transforming previous elements into an amended state. (2) The initial, forceful gestures on the left panel, with its rhapsodic red, evoke the primal drive that Harold Rosenberg would formulate as “Action Painting” within the context of Abstract Expressionism. This confrontation of Tomasko is met and countered by the right panel's expansive washes of ethereal sky blue, a reflective negation that preserves the original impulse while holding it in serene stasis. Contained within a single work, this arresting dialectical movement also echoes Rilke's line, “the lands divide from you, one going heavenward, one that falls.” Here the visual synthesis suggests that painting's way forward is not in a decisive rupture but in its ability to hold a divided, historically-laden present in its self-exploratory tension.

The exhaustion of painting’s history is perhaps nowhere more keenly felt than in Tomasko’s studio, where she grapples with finding purpose for a medium that has had its rules dismantled. Her paintings are not simply about feeling or memory; they are a conversation with abstraction’s past. The exhibition’s thematic frame, including concepts like the Dinggedicht and references to a literary figure Rilke, suggests a connection to literary traditions. Yet one wonders if the work’s power truly relies on this intellectual scaffolding. By reviving gestural painting and aggressive color, Tomasko forces a reckoning with a tradition that has been pushed to its limits. She grounds the work in its own visual reality rather than a borrowed literary idea. In their visual realities, Tomasko's canvases evoke a sense of an unfathomable macrocosm, whose boundless limits remain forever beyond the grasp of our limited sensory possibilities. The seemingly chaotic brushstrokes and fleeting resemblances are not mere personal expressions; they are strategies for engaging with a medium that must strive to reinvent itself within our post-medium condition.

Ultimately, the placement of Tomasko's visceral abstractions within the space of the strikingly contemporary Nino Mier Gallery unfolds its own cerebral narrative for her first solo show there. As that space reveals the ethos of transparency and adaptability of design of the architectural firm StudioMDA, a pivotal dialogue is generated between art and its environment. This dynamic tension—between the deeply personal, almost primal, mark of the artist and the polished, adaptable architectural frame—defines our current aesthetic landscape. Rather than being a conflict, this interplay underscores art's resilient capacity to seed introspection in the white cube of the contemporary gallery. It is here that the expansive gestures of Tomasko press against the rational organization of the exhibition space, where the canvas appears to embody the edge of the cosmos, mediating between the contained world of human design and the unknowable, macrocosmic universe. In turn, this very fiction grounds our aesthetic experience in a primal, internal realm. Here, too, Hegel’s notion of Aufhebung reveals itself as pointedly arresting, with Tomasko’s chromatic marks functioning as corporeal gestures on a flat surface. That surface, rather than remaining flat, instead mitigates into the exhibition space that contains the viewing subject. (3)

Thus, the hypnotic hedonism of the Ferris wheel, the engrossing musicality of “Spinning the Wheel,” and the cast-iron columns of the gallery partake in our apperception of Tomasko’s paintings. This grasp, we are left to understand, is as formalist as it is phenomenological. The work's profound resonance is perhaps best expressed not just by George Michael's song, but by the existential longing of Muse's propulsive track “The Dark Side.” For it is here, at the edge of the conceptual cosmic horizon, where the exhilaration of the spin meets the terror of the unknown. WM

Notes

1. Dita Amory et al., Vertigo of Color: Matisse, Derain, and the Origins of Fauvism (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2023), pp. 17–24.

2. The concept of Aufhebung, central to Hegel's dialectic, encapsulates the simultaneous actions of negating, preserving, and elevating. For its seminal articulation, see G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). While often translated as “sublation,” the German term deliberately retains interwoven meanings, a point elaborated in works by such commentators as Robert Pippin or Charles Taylor.

3. The dialectical process of Aufhebung—where existing conditions are negated, preserved, and elevated to a higher synthesis—finds a compelling parallel in contemporary architectural practices. For an exemplary demonstration of such a transformative process, consider StudioMDA's approach, where existing site conditions or material constraints are not merely overcome, but sublated into innovative design solutions that integrate and transcend their predecessors. This approach, as discussed by theorists of critical regionalism or architectural phenomenology, embodies a continuous Aufhebung of the built environment and spatial experience. See also, Nadir Lahiji, An Architecture Manifesto: Critical Reason and Theories of a Failed Practice (London: Routledge, 2019), which significantly engages with the concept of Aufhebung in architectural discourse.

– Raphy Sarkissian