︎ Liliane Tomasko, Untitled, 2018
Acrylic and acrylic spray on linen

You Want It Darker


︎ Catalogue Essay
︎ November 2019

Catalogue essay for Liliane Tomasko’s solo exhibition dark goes lightly at Château La Coste, Aix-en-Provence, 21 October – 18 December 2019. (More information on the exhibition here.)

Extract:

Nine of the thirteen paintings in this exhibition have titles prefixed with “a dream of”, and one “dreaming of”. We are firmly rooted in the realm of the nocturnal, the nonlinear, digging deeper into the subconscious, but this need not always be dark. In dreaming of Suzanne (2018), I am sure I can make out the bowed head and exposed breast of a woman, reclining into a sunset. Stark black lines dashed against an all-enveloping apricot, it’s a sun-kissed vision charged with jouissance. In the bright, hot, vivid a dream of: A RED THREAD (2018), coiling red paint lashes forth tongue-like from beds of fuzzy peach and frothy white stripes. The work’s fragmentary title and hallucinatory division of space is both compelling and cryptic: do we follow the unspooling red thread? Grasp it? Untangle or unravel it? Red, the most powerful and evocative of all colours, heralds both danger and desire; a red thread could present a warning but also deep connection; some kind of cosmic umbilical cord, connecting us to the universe and every living thing within it.

︎: rosa.vertov@protonmail.com