Artist Statement: Joseph Pisani Thirty Years Toward an Impossible Pledge

I have spent thirty years preserving what mortality insists on taking. I made an impossible pledge at the age of twenty-three: how to do everything in just one lifetime. I paint medium to large-scale abstracts I call existential landscapes: visual journals built from dates, places, wounds, and celebration. I compress experiences from my journey, from the Vorfreude of planning and the physical struggle of the approach to the tension, jubilation, fear, or haunting beauty that lingers, into a single piece.

In 1995, my journal was torn from my lap during a violent car crash in the desert outside Las Vegas. I found it in the sand so tattered and covered in dust that it was unrecognizable. It lay open on my final entry, shuffling in the hot breeze. In 1996, I played a concert on a stage where Chuck Berry would perform the next night. I took this as a sign to abandon painting and pursue music exclusively. I did the opposite, realizing performances were ephemeral, while a painting is an artifact. These encounters with absence and permanence, a tension that contrasts the live happening with my drive to compress experiences into a single piece, became the foundation of my practice.

Working on canvas, paper, and reclaimed wood, I use acrylic, pencil, and oil pastel to build texture and layers of pigment, contrasting glazes, heavy impasto, and fluid drips. I etch tally marks, indecipherable words and symbols, and scars into the surface, using sfregamento, scraping, sanding, and reapplying paint to reveal or obscure details. What I partially bury is the closest I can get to holding on to what would otherwise vanish. I use poetic titles as clues, asking the viewer to measure the connection between them and the work, and prompting them to reflect on their own attempts to preserve time, something they too will ultimately lose.

I am currently exploring how scale affects what endures, while writing a book entitled How to Do Everything in Just One Lifetime, documenting thirty years honoring my impossible pledge.