Eating Painting

Eating Painting, curated by James Biederman and Lisa Taliano, is on view at 308 at 156 Project Artspace (156 5th Avenue, Suite 308), New York from June 25 - August 15, 2015. The show features works by James Biederman, Cora Cohen, Ben La Rocco, Gerard Mossé, Fran O’Neill, Judy Pfaff, Lisa Taliano, Russell Roberts, and Thornton Willis. Eating Painting presents works that embody painting as an immersive sensory experience - the “consumption of paint as color and substance.” Special thanks to James Biederman for granting permission to reprint his catalogue essay below.

Eating Painting
by James Biederman

The multiplicity of the senses and mind mingle in the vaporous state of being. The alertness of the eye opens the door to the pictorial and questions the unknown spacecraft. We hover above, waiting and searching for a point of entry: a safe place to land to begin our exploration. Set adrift amongst the foreign terrain, we float and turn to regain our lost gravity. There is no past, no history. I am center to this world, this tumbling of thoughts and sights. Somehow my feet have lost their grounding. The painter’s presence has entered my being. I enter the painting. I enter the painter. It is now. It is present. The light and dark, the quickness and slowness, the exactitude and amorphous, the overwhelming sense of colors and feelings: where am I? We are falling without weight nor gravity to pull or stop our spinning and turning and going inside out with no ups nor downs.

The thunder of chattering voices and noisy terrestrial things has left a vacuum of silence. The colors appear from drops of dew, blinding yellow and burning red colliding with orange and shattering down purple all smashed and pushed against the emptiness of forever’s ever and nothing’s nothing.

I see and desire and want and feel, it is there but not, steps away, always away, a little too far. The cavities of cells filter the thoughts. No thoughts. Not before. Not then. Only now before it goes away.

Quickly, now, the time, the madness of slowness, let go of handles and hooks, we are looking and eating a painting or two.

- James Biederman, May 2015

James Biederman, Bus to Cali, 60 x 52 inches, oil on linen, 2008 (courtesy of the artist)

Cora Cohen, Red Tablet, 34 x 38 inches, acrylic mediums, pigment, watercolor on linen, 2013 (courtesy of the artist)

Ben La Rocco, Saturn Evolution, 96 x 48 inches, oil on masonite, 2015 (courtesy of the artist)

Gerard Mossé, Near There, 36 1/2 x 60 1/2 inches, oil on linen, 2012-2015 (courtesy of the artist)

Fran O’Neill, don’t back down, 66 x 66 inches, oil on canvas, 2015 (courtesy of the artist)

Judy Pfaff, Jules, 48” x 48 x 32 inches, artificial flowers, acrylic, paper, melted plastic, 2014 (courtesy of the artist)

Lisa Taliano, Probable Cause, 48 x 50 inches, oil on linen, 2014 (courtesy of the artist)

Russell Roberts, Pockets of Accumulation #29, 66 x 50 inches, oil on canvas, 2010 (courtesy of the artist)

Thornton Willis, Downtown, 61 x 52 inches, oil on canvas, 2012 (courtesy of the artist)