Content Coloured All Confused or Awash with Uncoded Crackles

October 9, 2024
Author Toby Üpson

Reinis Lismanis: Audit, 12 September - 12 October 2024, Gerald Moore Gallery, London, UK

It seems appropriate that I am approaching the artworks included in ‘Audit’ digitally, across my phone, laptop and tablet computer screens. Personally, reviewing Reinis Lismanis’ paintings in this way evokes a sense of stuttery LCD-like latency; a tone-of-feel that complements the materialities of Lismanis’ tech-coloured streams as they mutter breathlessly. My thoughts bleed into these backlit moments, filling the space between them, like magnetised ink, overfilling them too, like an error in printing or a screen clogged by rain. Suspended between buffering images and the arrival of words, my eyes ebb and flow; I drift from screen to screen to screen, then out to my immediate surroundings, a coffee cup, a design magazine, before returning, again and again, to screen and screen. This is a particularly nonsensical way of surveying, both the constitutive parts of this exhibition as well as the casual clutter that logs my homely living. It is a process whereby time and space get lost in a spiral of preambled looking, where even the smallest of chance encounters invites ruminative serendipity. To say Lismanis’ artworks load as a clockwise swells is a truism. But hold up, this is not a siloed chrono- or logical movement, nothing like the streamlined imagery appearing on my ever optimised news feed. Lismanis’ artworks crystallise at different speeds, through innately painterly motions. Like a wave, his artworks become with and through a breaching of material borders; they become through pulsating leaks; through a process where a machine’s functioning is pushed to its tipping point. That is, here, an artistic process perforates standardised movements, so as to allow little details to shimmer anomalous. In a way, Lismanis’ paintings instantiate how images wash onto and across my screens, foregrounding the central throbs of creation (those ‘background’ operations that circle a burgeoning image’s life, which we ignore, or vilify, as meek procedural residue soon be upgraded out of existence). To flow deeper into this philosophical fuzz, we can think about this asynchronicity in relation to the death of time: if the vertical structures of doom-scrolling (a downward whirl that pulls the stuff of everyday life from its plain of sensual existence) kill time then the becoming nature of Lismanis’ artworks reincarnate a horizon (a horizontal plain and place-time beyond knowing, where the commodification of operations is futile because everything is felt as a means not as an ends). That is, his paintings picture a life’s becoming in and as an inky haze. I feel this. Sitting before Lismanis’ images as they load, my eyes drift free from a small screen’s vertical death grip with the stuffy refuse of and on my horizon becoming newly animate and available. I wonder if there is there something political in this practice (in this leaky load looking; in this reclaiming of image space, and spaces in-between; the shift from vertical death to horizontal lifelines; in surveying assurances and making set standards shake; in the timorous picturing of horizons?), an audit provokes organisational fear after all. To me, Lismanis’ seems like a practice of refraction, to use a loaded phrase: a change in direction, or a division in parts, caused by some oblique shift in medium. Or at least this seems like a practice where the process of refraction becomes a protagonist. With production and product confused, systemic markers, once fobbed off as merely form bearing and faulty, lag or tip-tap anew with life. Appearing soft, as if thumbed, worn-out or frozen on route to a phone’s feed, the small parts of this exhibition have an enlivening touch; I feel like we could touch them or that they have already been touched and we are now left with the painted traces of an existence unmoored from deadtime operations. This audit is about the joy of looking, looking deeply at, with and around. It is an exhibition coloured by a life’s refuse and its constituting details. It is a review of how things bleed together, all leaky and … loading …

Reinis Lismanis ‘Audit’
Gerald Moore Gallery, London
12 September – 12 October 2024
The photographs are courtesy of the artist.