The painter, we are often told, is a threatened species, one perhaps doomed to extinction. Painting, critic and curators tell us, is due to be replaced by other, more up-to-date methods of representation - video, or digital photography. Or else, if it survives, it will be expected to confine itself to abstraction - to be, in other words "painting for painting's sake", the record of a process that has nothing to do with the figurative. Liliane Tomasko's work treads a delicate, surefooted path between extremes. Her paintings are indeed representational, but what they represent is not really of much significance. The subject is a stepping off point, not an end in itself. One way of looking at her work is to approach it through the history of Romanticism in art. Her cloud studies, for instance, will immediately remind people of the work of the great English landscape painter John Constable [1776-1837], who was apparently the first to make paintings of this kind. Other works in this exhibition, the studies of bedclothes, may perhaps remind the erudite of somewhat similar detail studies by the German painter Adolph von Menzel [1815-1905]. The difference is, of course, that neither Constable nor Menzel made paintings of this sort as ends in themselves. They were always intermediary works that led towards a more 'finished' result. Sketches of this kind have only recently become valued for their own sake. When one reads the artist's own notes about her creative method, one sees that there is in fact a slightly different and much more fruitful comparison to be made. Tomasko says that she works, not directly from the thing itself, but from the photolibrary that she has built up over the years. This collection of images, she says, provides a store of visual ideas, some of which have proved to be central to her work. Looking at the cloud studies, one's mind therefore turns, not to Constable, but to the great early 20th century photographer Alfred Stieglitz [1864-1946], whose cloud studies [which he entitled 'Equivalents'] are one of the central achievements of his life. For Stieglitz, the challenge was to take material which seemed essentially formless, and use the camera to give it form. The images that resulted were 'equivalent' in his mind to various moods or states of mind. The paradox was of course that photography, in Stieglitz's day if perhaps less so now, was regarded as a pre-eminently realistic medium, the servant of objective rather than of subjective vision. By using it to create images that mirrored his own emotional state, Stieglitz linked photography to the aesthetic philosophy of Symbolism. In the broad sense, I think Tomasko can also be thought of as a Symbolist artist. What one is dealing with here is the link between art and feeling. Each of the paintings in this exhibition reflects what has been felt, as well as presenting a report on something that has been seen. There can be no doubt, however, that the act of seeing is both focused and intense. Tomasko describes how, before actually beginning to paint, she transcribes the image in pencil. "This," she says, "is a very important part of the process for me; the continual making and erasing of marks is like a ritual attempt to enter the photographic reality. In the space between the promise of the finished painting and the faintly described image on the canvas, the picture belongs entirely to me. Once paint is engaged, a fair amount of control has to be given up in order for the painting to appear." One characteristic of painting, from the mid 19th century onwards, has been a tendency to focus increasingly on things which would, at earlier epochs, have seemed disappointingly minor. Cézanne's still lifes are a celebrated case in point; so too are the paintings of bottles made by Giorgio Morandi. In one sense, works of this type are simply a modernist continuation of a tradition which emerged at the very beginning of the 17th century, when still life painting established itself as an independent genre. A distant ancestor of Tomasko's paintings of bedclothes is Caravaggio's celebrated 'Basket of Fruit' in the Ambrosiana in Milan. What Cézanne did was to transfer the viewer's attention almost completely from what was seen to the actual act of perception, and the way in which this was dramatised or acted out on the surface of the canvas. Tomasko pushes this process forward by her preference for incomplete scenes or objects. She does not, for example, ask us to look at an unmade or rumpled bed as a complete object. Instead, she offers just a part. Obviously there are precedents for this in pre-modern art. When Leonardo, in his notebooks, urges a painter to look at the random stains on a wall as a possible source of inspiration, he is, in fact, urging the would be creator to impose form and structure on imagery which is by its nature formless. Similarly both Constable's and Stieglitz's cloud studies impose order on situations which are essentially inchoate. Since the invention of photography audiences have become more and more accustomed to the kind of arbitrary cropping which the camera not only makes possible but actually encourages - one might even say in some cases imposes. Stieglitz belonged to the first generation of photographers who made full use of this, and its impact is visible in many of the paintings produced by his wife, Georgia O'Keeffe [1887-1986]. As O'Keeffe's work demonstrates, this new compositional freedom was often acquired at a price. There is something curiously flat and denatured about many of her paintings - they tend to look better in reproduction than as originals. Tomasko, I think, is keenly aware of this danger. A striking aspect of her work is the delight that she takes in paint as a substance. These are in no sense photo-realistic works. There is also no element of illusionism. In other words, we are never in any doubt that what we are looking at is a painted surface, not the thing itself. What she is attempting is an alchemical act, the translation of one kind of reality into another, very different, kind of reality. A fundamental difference between the description of something in words - some object or situation - and the description of the same thing in paint, is that the painter can describe the same things over and over, without the least risk of monotony. We see this in the art of Morandi and we also see it equally clearly in the work of earlier masters such as Chardin. When painting abandons complex subject matter it does not necessarily cease to be complex in itself. One branch of Modernism and its successor Post Modernism seeks to avoid this by insisting that the object need not be represented - it can simply be selected and given a different context. It is the simple act of recontexualization which turns it into art. Liliane Tomasko, it is clear, does not agree with this formulation. She sees painting as a method of taking possession of aspects of the material world that would otherwise be unavailable to her. She speaks, for example of light which seems to be generation from 'within' the painting, rather than simply falling on the painted surface in order to reveal what is there. These paintings are figurative, in the sense that they do in fact have recognisable subjects. The real subject, however, is the same in each work, whatever is ostensibly represented. It is the way in which the painter has become engaged with the whole business of making a work of art - a work which will be fully separate from herself, but which will at the same time act as a container for the thoughts and feelings she had while creating it. Edward Lucie-Smith A fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Edward Lucie-Smith in English and German is available, 68 pages, 48 illustrations, clothbound hardcover, 27.3 x 18.5 cm. The show will remain on view through Saturday, April 13, 2006 at the Jamileh Weber Gallery, Waldmannstrasse 6, CH-8001 Zurich. Hours: Tuesday through Friday, 11am to 6pm, Saturday 10am to 4pm and by appointment. For further information or photographs please contact the gallery, phone: +41-1-252 10 66, fax: +41-1-252 11 32 email: info@jamilehweber.com, www.jamilehweber.com