‘Fluorescent realism’ is the phrase that jumped to mind when looking at the work of Liliana Monteiro. The vividness of her colours have a definite scale to them, ranging in effect from a solid pastel swirling mass outlined by a form, for example, her tree-like representation serving as the background to her website, to the hallucinogenic, surrealist suspended cityscapes leaving this observer standing in mid-air. Not merely confined to the optical effects of neon signage, her work evokes a mysterious range of chromatic experience that is off the ordinary scale.

Ordinary, however, needs to be questioned. It is not that her paintings are unusual as much as typical sensory perception is limited. It is the fuller range of reality expressed through colour that her work reminds us of, those receptive to having their perceptual boundaries stretched or, more accurately, restored to a primordial awareness of the ‘possibleness’ of what is. The effects that she is able to orchestrate are a product of drawing skill, for example, the star fish in her seascape series, or the urban forms in her landscapes, thrown against a raging tempest of explosive colour.

          In her seascape series starfish floats up to the observer, a question mark posing the riddle of existence. The same idea is expressed through the rhythms of her mostly urban landscapes. The overall impression is of a desolate midnight where the usual forms – railroad tracks, cubic downtown apartment buildings, roads, have been emptied of any conventional meaning as well of people. Yet in that desolation there is renewal if only because the shocking colours, pink against blue and yellow, assault the viewer with an unexpected lyrical quality. It is as if the Walking Dead were on an LSD trip.

          One painting outrageously has a well-drawn white and blue building set against a flat stream of running browns. The total effect denies any accustomed perspective, denying the viewer any comfortable way of ‘making sense.’ The viewer is standing in a void and fears looking down for fear of his/her perceptual life. This discombobulating effect with its perceptual distortions induces an eerie fascination, awakening and liberating the eerie, uncanny qualities that the everyday perception represses. Monteiro’s work is shockingly and astoundingly liberating.  

          Liberation first requires experiencing the desolation of form, the fears associated with the Unknown objectified. It was the same impulse exhibited by the Stone Age paintings of the Lascaux caves, when frightening images of animals appearing suddenly in the cave’s dark recesses, confronted the hunter. Monteiro’s work has a similar function. Her paintings have a magical, other-worldliness that vicariously lift up the observer to experience reality in a more vibrant and intense way. Instead of actual beasts, the starfish aside, the beasts are now the products of our own collective imagination, we who are information-age gatherers and hunters. We hunt now for a more meaningful life, the tones of this journey caught by the perverse-reverse colours of Monteiro’s art. To view them is to be struck by the thunder of their stillness.