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 travel across 73 countries and counting, observations and field photography are etched in a World Ledger of lived experience that forms 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 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...