LILIANE TOMASKO
The Switzerland-born artist welcomes us into her inner world, one that explores the dimension of dreams and the exact place it all begins: an unmade bed, a mess of sheets tangled with a brush and paint.
Liliane Tomasko (Zürich, 1967) wants to take the public for a ride to the land of dreams and how the unconscious affects us, whether or not we are aware of it.
In her work, she has been exploring an absolute abstraction. Her pieces, which are sometimes extraordinarily colorful and others almost monochrome, are full of solid and thick brushstrokes, curved lines -she has referred to them as “reptilian waves”- and the colors are placed one with the other, where we can easily follow the path of said brushstrokes and see where they begin and end. We can almost envision the artist’s painting, the movement of her hand, her whole arm going across the surface.
Tomasko has said that an object as simple and quotidian as a bed is the starting point of most of her pieces. The wrinkles on the sheets, the mess of an unmade bed and the poetic of it all.
Beds have been highly recurring in art. Vincent van Gogh’s The bedroom (1888) and Tracy Emin’s famous work My Bed (1998) come to mind. Even John Lennon and Yoko Ono chose a bed to fight for peace in 1969. Beds have a duality in them. They give some of us a sense of comfort, of being able to escape for a while, to pause everything and dive into that other reality. One where we can let go and see what happens. Moreover, to some other people is a spider web -which reminds us of the Swiss artist pieces- a trap that paralyzes us.
Regarding Tomasko’s work, the canvas -or linen and board in these cases- has no free space left. The acrylic paint covers every single centimeter, leaving us with an almost claustrophobic sensation. Each piece resembles an open window that leads us to the artist’s world.
