Liliane Tomasko

However different these themes are: they are consistently bound by their origin in photography. Liliane Tomasko organizes groups of paper bags in still-life compositions and then photographs them with a Polaroid camera. She follows the same procedure with the stacks, which are in fact soft sculptures that are then photographed as an extreme close-up, so that physical, three-dimensional  space is pushed to the edges and corners of the picture plane. Exactly the same procedure is followed when dark corners and fragments of windows are photographed. However, these are not high quality photographs the artist starts with. They are Polaroid images, and hence they are soft and somewhat indistinct, often with rich colors, or colors that tend to be too dark or too bright in relation to the original subject. The photographs are small. With these pictures, using simultaneously the memory of the subject, the subject is transformed into painting and that returns it to something like its original size. The process of abstraction and mystification allows this painter to use a soft painting style, that gives to the subject a kind of mystery and luminosity that was entirely absent at the outset. So the paintings, through their emotionally invested surfaces, take the motif through cheap photography, back into romantic painting, with a new beauty and original edge. There is a significant comment in these paintings on our contemporary world. In the way that images transform the meaning of objects that they are meant to represent. So that the issue of representation and misrepresentation is omnipresent. A journey through the transformative power of medium: and the power of painting as a medium made by hand in the absolute now.