These paintings are a physical means to grapple with a theoretical shift in the conception of materiality that requires us to rethink our understanding of what it is to have a body. They are engendered by a way of thinking and feeling that recognizes embodied beings as enmeshed in the material world in such a way that we can’t separate ourselves from it. Bodies and places are continuous. The material world does not just surround us, it moves through us. Our bodies are not enclosed capsules, they are radically open to the wider environment. The material world dynamically crosses through us, transforms us and is transformed by us. We are not bodies on the earth, we are in the earth. Our bodies are part of the living earth, and therefore the damage we do to the earth is damage we do to our bodies.
This viewpoint rejects the notion of bonded individuals and decenters the human subject. These paintings are a way of exploring new forms of subjectivity that go beyond the individual through affect and performativity. In making this work I ask myself - are there forms of subjectivity that go beyond thinking of myself as an individual? Forms of subjectivity that open me up to include my surroundings, that allow me to identify with the larger body of the earth?
2024
My work explores the painting process as a tool for thinking through vision and touch. The paintings are built up in thin layers, relying on the transparent quality of the paint and the treatment of the underlying ground to produce a tactile surface of light and color.
These paintings are about the connection between our bodies and the earth, how what affects the earth affects our bodies, the earth as body, as mother.
They blur the distinction between abstraction and representation, thinking and feeling, figures and landscapes. They’re about porous borders, things turning into other things, into each other, the process of change, changing thinking.
They’re not figures in landscapes but figure as landscape or landscape as figure; our bodies and the world inseparably entangled, the mesh we can’t step out of, the catastrophe we’re in.
Lisa Taliano, 2018
These abstract paintings are a representation of the world from within - matter painted as a dynamic and shifting entanglement of relations. Painting as a form of thinking through touch, these paintings are a non-cognitive way of thinking about the character and nature of sentient life. Materiality of paint, formal considerations, and process outweigh discursive content. The paintings are impure abstractions that invite associations, narratives and references to personal, felt experience.
My work plays within an ambiguous space that calls into question the distinction between figure and ground, subject and object, here and there. Whatever combination of diffuse or sharply defined areas of color, gestural marks, systematic strokes, biomorphic forms or geometric shapes, the flatness of the surface is always considered in a diffractively defined loose net of inscriptions, creating a lively and indeterminate fluctuation of interchangeable parts.
Lisa Taliano, 2019
My work is defined by indeterminate rules that shift and change in the process of making and doing. I mark the location of my awareness in the midst of the multiplicity and the intervals between things that open onto new possibilities and unchartered directions; creating a loose, unfinished structure made from sensations prior to forms and representations. The optic and haptic construction produced is based on a logic that is not about resolving contradictions, but rather weaving together the energies and reflections on the intense and peculiar complexity in the fabric of things. The aim of the game is to find the conditions under which something new can be created.
Lisa Taliano, 2015
I see the surface of the painting as a mental dimension open to the searching mind, where the subjective and objective meet. The play of the geometric shapes on the two dimensional plane is an extension of the mind in space. The result is a configuration which represents a particular interior state, or reflection of my self.
Painting for me is a form of self reflection, a means of furthering self knowledge. In the process of painting, daily life and memories filter their way into the work, and the paintings become a record or diary of felt experience. I paint for myself, but I also paint to connect with others through our shared feelings.
Lisa Taliano, 2010