It was the touch, that’s all it was
21st June - 6th July 2024
Lisa Liljeström
Curated by Elaine ML Tam
Sarah Kravitz gallery is pleased to present ‘It was the touch, that’s all it was’, the first UK solo exhibition of Swedish painter Lisa Liljeström, curated by Elaine ML Tam. Invoking touch as a sensuous metaphor for immediacy, imprint and impression, the exhibition considers Liljeström’s use of airbrush techniques and absent touch in the context of collective memory. Selected and then rendered from the artist’s digital archive of source material – as varied as cropped movie stills and screengrabs of scarcely watched YouTube clips – the evanescent, monochromatic paintings behave as manifest phantasm. Each a figment of narrative, each a partial held in suspense, painting here becomes a re-mediated event that speaks of the image's ambivalent role in anamnesis. A tribute to the ‘little life’, Liljeström’s personal term for the neglected detail or the ‘nothing of note’, the exhibition contests the remembrance of an idealised subject in veneration of another kind of existence.
Moments later, the folder became an archive. By this I mean a transformation from mere repository to object of intention, whose function is to behave as a keepsake of cultural shreds for the anonymous future. Its rules were flexible, emergent, not predefined – one might say this runs counter to the rule of the rule.
The folder works in the way of a striped paper bag containing mixed sweets, or the perimeter of a car park hosting a jumble sale. There is a loose sense of etiquette about it even if unspoken, and there are innumerable permutations.
The folder was then arranged and re-arranged by the main organising principles: alphabeti- sation and chronology. The former might speak more to her state of mind at the point of filing. Here, an arbitrary bash to the keyboard in haste has rendered a muddle of letters, though each sequence imprinting the user’s digits: alskdjhaksljd.jpg. There, Capture 1 indicates slight but exhausted regard for establishing a numeric system for later use, surely soon disregarded. It is then clear that our archi- vist had decided to be more fastidious with her filing in order to aid finding, in other words, aid recall. Because the folder, had to eventually be stored on a 64GB unit in light of its unruly growth. It was then exactly that and perhaps only that: a piece of hardware externalising and immortalising the idiosyn- cratic interests of this painter that kept an archive and lived, once.
Lisa Liljeström
I’m Never in Debt 2023
airbrush on canvas
60x50 cm
Lisa Liljeström
Untitled 2024
airbrush on canvas
61x34cm
Lisa Liljeström
Downstairs 2023
airbrush on canvas
140x115 cm
Organisation by chronology in her Macbook’s ‘Gallery mode’ strangely restages the now-obso- lete practice of staging family album slideshow, although none of the images belong to her, strictly. The magic reanimation of a carousel of slides by light, light which had first fastened the image to a thin film of plastic, again hitting the image with fervour. The light from excitable, repeat-viewings of a certain slide could burn a hole in it, such that favourite memories were liable to be erased by over-exposure. Such cruel irony plagues the desire to remember, in that the very act of chasing an elusive moment or feeling results in its defeat, yet an undeniable part of its intrigue. All this supposition aside, the image, for its part, seemed to want nothing more than to be evaporate, become impersonal and airy and free.
The problem for her was not loss by deterioration but loss to quantity, the inability to locate an image once the archive grew too vast. Remembering became more about the meta-structures to sup- port remembering, in other words, fashioning an airtight method and means so that an image could not escape into the labyrinthine entrails of obscurity. Impossible; there are always gaps, distractions, that which defies sense, and the awkwardly poetics of usefully naming these. What was she thinking the evening she parsed a YouTube clip with 72 views of the restoration of an old church bell, to extract a single still? alskdjhaksljd.jpg
Lisa Liljeström
Scars on my Knees 2023
Airbrush on canvas
4x 115x95 cm
Therefore, few further theories. From that year, she had saved hundreds of images, only some of which would become airbrushed painting. This may or may not be indicative of the following:
1. Loneliness, so wrongly attributed to long periods of time spent isolated in her studio, and others’ impressions and opinions on something as delicate as her loneliness hoofing into awareness
2. That an image addict’s low-brow indefatigability is a subsidiary mode of contemporary being, one apparently unsatisfied by the play-on-demand show available on Amazon Prime all her friends are chortling about in the Whatsapp group
3. The impulse to violence – to isolate, crop, splice and superimpose – to yield mutant narrative forms with Frankensteinian lust, as means of disappointing our aegis of well-devised, linear histories
Lisa Liljeström
The Storm’s Picking Up 2024
airbrush on canvas
60x50 cm
When it is said that someone is ‘in touch’ with something, they may be referring to a body of knowledge that is likewise a kind of currency. It infers that they are in direct contact with a thing or idea that is ephemeral, we know that these move on swiftly irrespective of us. I touch when I want to show immediacy or intimacy or the presentness of my rage. Suspending touch is then its own expres- sion of withdrawal or revocation or impotence; I disallow touch when I cannot bear to receive it. Re- straint has its own way of feeling violent. But to force touch is never a solution, she lies awake thinking, as the body that sleeps beside her nightly suddenly seems alien and profound.
From banks of the archive to the rendering of an image as painting, touch is merely flirtation. The image, meanwhile, teases and tempts and tarnishes retinal memory – even provides a false sense of security – though its truth is the melancholy of it being utterly unreachable. The event, thrice removed, travels with the aloofness of a haunting. As if aroused from sleep by the twitch of a phantom limb, memory is like weather falling upon the remotest places of sensation. It was the touch, that’s all it was
Lisa Liljeström
It was the touch that’s all it was 2024
airbrush on canvas
95x115 cm