SOFT FLESH

About Lisa Mühleisen's soft and fleshy monochromes

They flow softly over the flesh-colored planes – the light-reflecting drops of transparent synthetic resin. Again and again they glisten in the light, especially when thicker bulges have accumulated at the end of their droplet trail. In places, these trails blur into the fleshy background, leaving a hint of a trace that is only visible through a slightly darker coloring of the incarnate on the wooden panel.

Lisa Mühleisen's monochromes from the series Soft Flesh directly and immediately show what they are: ground, color surface, painting media, frame. In this reference to themselves, the focus is on their formal qualities: the unobtrusive rhythms of their all-over compositions, the color effects of the planes varying from pale pink to dark brown, the different light reflections and transparencies, the contrasts of surface textures. At the same time, however, they can also – and their respective titles give reason to do so – refer to something beyond themselves. Sometimes ambiguously sensual and Christian at the same time (Sticky Passion), sometimes emphatically feminine (She-She), the shimmering drops of synthetic resin on the acrylic lacquered, flesh-colored surfaces then become naturalistic body images.

In this way, Lisa Mühleisen's monochromes bring together what, according to monochrome logic, does not belong together: the long unchallenged understanding of painting as the illusion of looking through an open window, as lastingly shaped by Leon Battista Alberti, and the rejection of this illusion by 20th-century abstract art in order to give painting's essential and previously denied qualities back their deserved attention. Mühleisen's monochromes do not take sides in this process. Especially in their two-sided nakedness, they seem all the more intimate.

Therefore, Lisa Mühleisen loves illusion in painting when it can be pure painting at the same time. According to monochrome tradition, which hates illusion in painting because it cannot be pure painting at the same time, this love is impossible. But it is precisely with her reconciliatory approach that Lisa Mühleisen allows her monochromes to be monochrome in a new way. 

Nicola Höllwarth, 2021