Joseph Pisani is a contemporary artist whose practice is governed by an Impossible Pledge: How to Do Everything in Just One Lifetime, a commitment he made 30 years ago. Through 73 countries and counting, guided by Serendipitous Mischief, visceral grit and field photography are forged into a World Ledger of slipping time and the basis of his Existential Landscape paintings.
For more than thirty years, Pisani has moved through 73 countries and counting, guided by Serendipitous Mischief. His artistic practice is driven by a single, impossible pledge: How to Do Everything in Just One Lifetime. The paintings that emerge are not merely scenes of places visited, but permanent records of the full friction and wonder of each journey, reflecting time, self, and impermanence…
Pisani intentionally navigates away from the easy route to gather the visceral grit and friction of circumstance that defines his work. Armed with little more than a backpack, a camera, and a journal, foreign lands become sensory laboratories. Refusing fixed itineraries creates space for Serendipitous Mischief: the unplanned detours, chance encounters, and the culture shock that overloads the senses, reorders the self, and generates the raw material from which his paintings…
Pisani developed the genre Existential Landscapes to describe his work. These paintings compress the friction of a journey into pigment and presence. The tally marks, etchings, and wounds on the surface are records of experience: the Vorfreude of planning, the physical struggle of the approach, the tension of moments along the way, and the haunting beauty that lingers long after…
Since his first journey in 1995, Pisani has carried a camera to every place he visited, documenting the foreign worlds he explored. The camera became his Second Sketchbook, a way to catch and savor the moments before they disappeared. Some capture moments of friction or excitement, while others are subtle juxtapositions of color or circumstance he noticed while others walked by, moments caught before they vanished…
I arrived in Cairo at precisely 6:52 am, 13 May 1998. I think it was...
Tokyo Haneda Airport was rather simple, but a bit unnerving with the detail of their...
I was recently asked to write a chapter in the Art book, “De la poule...