The Brooklyn Rail

Liliane Tomasko’s paintings often begin from unassuming domestic sources: rumpled bed sheets, bundles of laundry, the familiar fabrics that cover our bodies or clutter our homes. She is frequently drawn to the physical idiosyncrasies of slept-in, lived-in textiles, considering how they feel to the touch, how they fall together into accidental arrangements, folding, creasing, wrinkling, overlapping in happenstance ensembles of mismatched shapes and colors. But just as the loosely woven patterns of her abstract paintings have emerged, in part, from these ongoing habits of household phenomenology—a practice of mindful immersion in the felt details of matter-of-fact domesticity—Tomasko’s work is also attuned to other dimensions of experience. Resting her gaze on the mundane reality of tossed-and-turned bed sheets, Tomasko reflects, by association, on the restless unreality of dreams. Contemplating the managed muddle of ordinary home-life, she remains alert to the tensions and attractions of life beyond. Within each painting’s luminous warp and weft, contrasting influences are threaded together.

Five large acrylic-on-aluminium paintings form the core of Tomasko’s latest exhibition at Kerlin Gallery. All were made at her London studio over the course of the past year—and all are diptychs, of a distinct kind. Working on squarish panels (their scale ranging from five-feet to over six-feet tall, the height marginally greater than the width), Tomasko creates, in each case, a dense, multi-coloured miscellany of serpentine strips and abutting blobs. Some compositions establish a provisional, easeful decorum: heaps of softly curved, self-contained shapes, slumped and bunched like pillows on a couch or fruit spilling from a bowl. Others are insistently entangled: evincing, in the swirl and scrawl of their crowded, knotty designs, more agitated artistic energies. One by one, as a first step, Tomasko approached these as stand-alone paintings. Step two was a process of pairing up incidental affinities or points of productive difference, then matching each panel with a partner. The juxtapositions are tightly enjambed visual couplets: one packed box of line, shape and color joined side-to-side with another, the boundary between them either barely legible as one motley array bleeds into the next, or more markedly evident—catching the eye, signalling a break.

Duality is central to this body of work—but not polarity. The calculated doubleness of these split-screen paintings is less about strong distinctions than degrees of difference. Certainly, between parts, we can detect chromatic variations of hot and cold, dark and light; we see modifications of thick and thin, hard and soft, in the myriad brushstrokes. Yet such gradations are there too within individual panels. The experience as a viewer is to apprehend, across the wider expanse of the twinned paintings, a larger, richer range of shifts in formal intricacy and atmospheric intensity. Tomasko’s diptychs bridge separate points in an evolving artistic process: bringing together earlier and later outcomes of her studio activity—showing us adjustments in mood, energy, and more. As such, the paintings are adjoined time-capsules of sensory and perceptual memory: connecting episodes in the mind’s scramble of thoughts, apposing varied, in-the-moment responses to the world’s tangle of pleasures and pressures.

So, then, the exhibition’s title, Twofold, advances a notion of doubleness that is (like the bedding and blankets that have long engaged her as primary subjects) overlapping, enwrapping, intimately layered. Inner and outer realities fold over and into their counterparts. One work’s title, Mirror, Mirror, On that Wall (2024) pitches an idea of painting as near-magical manifestation of reflected individuality; yet within the bustling space of each parallel panel, we discover scrawly, wiry, spray-painted motifs that speak the visual language of the street: skinny lines that look like partial letter forms, or even fragments of lewd graffiti. The relative serenity of Un-Title-D (2024)—blooming with hints of mellow nature or Arcadian bliss (is that a butterfly on the top left, a reclining body on the bottom right?)—is nonetheless a scene made from artfully unsettled abstract oddments. As with other works in Twofold, Tomasko channels a buoyant mix of comfort and confusion. Such paintings, push-pulling in multiple directions, attest to the rigor of Tomasko’s formal deliberations while also, repeatedly and variously, affirming her avid, hypersensitive interest in the infinite subtleties and inevitable anxieties of everyday existence.