Dionisia Salas

 What is it like to be a painting? 

Dioni Salas’s recent paintings look like they could be many things. Up to a point, they take the appearance of feminist reflections on the genre of the nude: bodies flayed open by painting, in an act that suggests an analogy between the process of painting and biological life and death. You can find laid out, as if the picture plane was an operating table or a bed, what look like faces, eyes, mouths, livers and kidneys, penises, breasts, colons and rectums, gall bladders and skin, all pushed to and contained by the edges of the generally square paintings. The square holds in extremely intestinal pictures. 

You might also see signs of boneless bodies that are under stress: fistulas, boils, eruptions of infection, stains, vitiligo. And indications of pleasure, desire and life, in images that suggest breast milk, clitorises, anuses, sperm and ova, blood and vitamin-b-saturated urine. Of the urine, Dioni describes ‘drawing out of that colour’,i as if the act of drawing (and here I am also thinking of Andy Warhol’s Oxidation paintings, which were activated by piss) is an extension of her own excrementality. And, finally, you might see in these highly literate paintings some of painting or art history’s own highly conventional, iconographic allusions to the body, in the seashells and waves, the clouds and flower-forms. 

The titles of these pictures often support their association with the intense life of bodies and pleasure (whether bodily or visual). The paintings You, me, No tongue bitter she, With spent mouths and Of mouth and mind suggest states of ecstasy or bodies ‘spent’ by ecstasy. Sometimes – In the hellebors – these bodies loll about in pleasure gardens with yellow pussy cats, as if remembering Watteau or Fragonard’s landscapes of sensation and desire. At this point, the paintings slip into another epistemological place, when they become highly theatrical landscapes. The suggestions of prosceniums, the swirling, centripetal movement of forms, and the clearly differentiated depictive spaces (with what look like vanishing points or distant views in the centre of some pictures) are all acknowledgements of the historical conventions of landscape painting, albeit one that assumes cosmological connotations. It is at this point that, in terms of both intention and effect, the paintings link body and landscape. As curator Rebecca Edwards has recently written, Dioni’s ambiguous forms ‘could represent either the luminescent cosmic dust of distant nebulas or the intricacies of your lower intestine’; more specifically, for Dioni, the circles that dot many of the paintings are atomic, at once eyes, fingerprints, portals, planets and ‘cosmic mirrors’.ii 

As the pictures flip between the idea of bodies, landscape and cosmos, the experience of them becomes disorientated: Is the subject vertical or horizontal, and is it opened or closed? Is its space histological or cosmological, and does it fold out in front of me, or is it pressing up, square with my own body? Is it my picture or is it Dioni’s? 

The slippage between intention and identification (the tension between Dioni’s strategy and my identification with and conjuring of subject) is pleasurable to experience. While looking, power relations shift along points on the axis between the artist and the viewer. But Dioni is always clear to remind you that the picture has agency and a kind of intention or consciousness of its own. It, too, has its own axis: ‘every time I paint on canvas, something new happens’.iii Sometimes, this sense of a painting’s consciousness is quite literal: Dioni asserts that, in her works on paper, ‘the paper and the painting are holding on to each other.’iv In other places, it is diagrammatic, where each part of each painting seems to insist on its own expressive codes. Within the space of a single painting, there are often dozens of heterogeneous gestures and painterly modes, signifiers that stretch from highly modelled and illusionistic, to scumbled and decidedly provisional. 

These different gestural modes or patches often compete with each other, to the extent that they can each appear (if the expectation is that a painting is unified, coherent and singular) to belong to different paintings. At times, the patches are (in conventional terms) fully resolved, such as in the centre of Of mouth and mind. Carefully rendered waves of light blue and mauve ocean push up against a curved wall of terracotta blocks and then a small green field, in a series of interlocking forms that, like so much else of the space in this charismatic painting, seems to borrow from Watteau’s painting of the birthplace of Venus, The embankment for Cytherea (1717). The modelling here is relatively academic, with forms carefully built from dark to light. But immediately below this marine landscape is a purely graphic form, a quatrefoil of yellow underpainting, the shape of which has been emphasised by brushstrokes of thin mauve paint dragged over yellow ground and some patches of brown paint. Further up, just above the wavey seascape, a two-tiered tumescent yellow form is again treated in a completely different way. Parts of this floating form are rendered to indicate volume and shadow (and, with its redness, arousal), but the bulbous shapes are generally in-filled with short, scumbled strokes of feathery dry paint, with the form’s outline articulated as negative yellow underpaint. Three completely different systems of representation, each holding a different place on the scale of painterly ‘virtuosity’ or refinement, find themselves sharing the same support. This is repeated across the painting, as if each element separately calls on its own language, each signifier (to call on the terms of the artist Elizabeth Newman, with whom Dioni has a strong affinity) ‘flexes its status’.v 

In conversation, Dioni is clear to emphasise how this process of ‘flexing’ works. And while she identifies aspects of her practice with the loaded term ‘automatism’, she asserts the deliberative and dialectical aspect of her process: ‘It’s not intuition.’vi The idea of an artwork (especially a painting) having a will or life of its own that is intuited by or spirited through the artist has been highly mythologised, idealised in the trope of the artist–medium tapping into an abstract creative source. Jackon Pollock is the most obvious embodiment of this trope. Dioni’s conception of the artist, however, is much more prosaic. When she paints, Dioni focusses on her breath, both because it modulates her focus and her gesture, and because ‘breathing is a process that all of us do’. Focussing on breathing allows her to work ‘against the idea of the artist as somehow blessed.’vii 

As she has said of her methodology, and reflecting her interest in psychoanalysis: ‘Consciousness and intellect wrestle with the unconscious and gestural’.viii The painting process involves critical thinking (which calls on experience, practiced knowledge and her mnemonic archive), sensory phenomena such as feeling, the sovereign act of the painterly gesture, and wrestling with unconscious desires. Consciousness is the ‘something else’ of the process, for consciousness is simultaneously internal to Dioni’s experience of the world and her intention, and external to herself and her body. Consciousness is indicated in those moments when picture and substrate ‘hold on to each other,’ when different sensory experiences or gestures butt up against each other across a single painting, and whenever ‘something new happens’.ix This is the painting’s consciousness at work. 

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Over the last few decades, we have become increasingly aware of the ways that consciousness (long considered the province of counter-cultural or esoteric infatuation) has driven artistic innovation. Since the 1980s (when historiography sought to move past the ‘unhistorical universalising’ tendencies of modernist formalism), accounts of abstract painting have almost inextricably tied it to the phenomenal and the spiritual.x 

Related to this, recent art historical and curatorial inquiry into the generative relationship between abstraction, sentience and spiritualism has drawn attention to the pioneering work of women artists who have since the mid-nineteenth century negotiated, in quite different ways, painting’s connections to consciousness. Dioni explicitly names the work of these women, and others, as part of her archive: her teacher and mentor Vivienne Binns’ maps of consciousness; the theosophist Annie Bessant’s ‘thought-forms’; the Swedish mystic Hilma af Klint’s anthroposophical abstractions; Agnes Martin’s understanding of her ‘inspirations’ opening up access to consciousness of life; Georgiana Houghton’s mediumistic expressions of higher consciousness.xi Dioni no doubt absorbed Houghton’s work by osmosis, through her close connection to the late Kamberri-based artist Peter Maloney, who in the mid-1970s spent countless hours studying 35 of Houghton’s spirit drawings while attending services at the Victorian Spiritualists’ Union chapel in Naarm. Houghton’s spiritualism and her deep interest in the talismanic potential of concentric lines of paint had a sustained impact on Maloney’s work right up until his death in 2023, and can in turn be read in Dioni’s work. 

Many of the assumptions that these artists worked with (and in the case of Binns, still do) have now become, perhaps finally, the subject of rigorous scientific inquiry. Dioni becomes highly animated when talking about recent research on consciousness – the sense of awareness, feeling, affect and subjectivity that emerges in life. She has read that our conscious experience can continue for at least six hours after our clinical deaths: that our sense of self and subjectivity, and our capacity to apprehend information, can continue without our brain.xii 

Recent developments in resuscitation science and in the study of brain activity after clinical death – work that has perhaps in part been motivated by the increasingly wide availability of AI technologies – have brought us into the empirical study of consciousness. The study of near-death experiences and of the experience of life following clinical death suggests that consciousness – the experience of being – exists separate to brain activity and can continue even when our brain is not functioning. While the brain seems to be vital to consciousness, it does not produce it. Our consciousness, our selves, exists independently of our brain and can survive death, suggesting that consciousness has its own materiality. While still inconclusive, contemporary parapsychology and neuroscience contends that consciousness dwells somewhere outside of the brain, seemingly confirming ancient understandings of consciousness as a non-local force, like electromagnetism. As the neuroscientist Christof Koch has argued, as if directly describing one of Dioni’s paintings, ‘it is a simple step to conclude that the entire cosmos is suffused with sentience’.xiii 

This suggests that consciousness is both not specific to our physiological or cerebral matter (that it is ‘substrate-independent’),xiv and that it sits outside the conventional binary distinction of mind and body. This also implies that consciousness is universal; as Koch suggests, everything – every system and being – might have some element of consciousness. Indeed, contemporary science has opened up a can of worms: if we agree that the conditions of consciousness and subjectivity can be extended to the dogs, cats, horses and cows that we love, then why should it stop there. What is specific to the experience of mammal life that holds this privilege, outside of Christian hierarchies or Kantian morality? And if consciousness can exist outside of the brain and the body, can it be extended to other things, like a painting?xv Artists and art historians have often suspected as much: three decades ago, the art historian WJT Mitchell described pictures as bearing subjectivity, consciousness and, potentially, autonomy: ‘Pictures want equal rights with language, not to be turned into language. They want neither to be levelled into a “history of images” nor elevated into a “history of art” but to be seen as complex individuals occupying multiple subject positions and identities.’xvi 

I am taken with the philosopher Jane Bennett’s highly influential notion, which artists (the Surrealists, for example) have long understood, of vibrant materiality – the proposition that things (objects and events: that is, not just living things) can be actants that have material agency and carry energetic vitality.xvii Bennett argues, by way of unpicking the politics of ecological equilibrium and the shared atomic nature of all things, that objects can become vibrant ‘with a certain effectivity of their own’, and can ‘make things happen [and] produce effects’.xviii Drawing on the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the thinking of the philosopher and architectural theorist Manuel DeLanda, Bennett contends that all objects or things hold ‘the miracle of expression’ and creative self-organisation, such as 'chemical systems at far from-equilibrium states [that] inexplicably choose one path of development rather than another'.xix

I think this describes Dioni’s process in action, her paintings seemingly capable of creative self-organisation. This is neither controversial nor speculative: anyone who has worked with paintings (or any picture) over time understands how they are actants that have material agency. Conservators will tell you how colours change, and how areas of colour can move up and down the layers of a painting, while it is being made and then throughout its life. To use the logic of evolutionary science, colour has a will to self-organise and also to dominate – not just in the optical sense, where red pigments look back at us with more visual power than, say, blue, but in the sense that some colours actively seek to overpower other colours by materially subsuming them. The piss-yellow ground of many of Dioni’s paintings literalises this will to autonomy, always somehow seeping up through the paint layers to reassert itself. In this schema, pigment, gesture and picture have consciousness and regularly flex their agency. 

This is not to say that these pictures painted themselves, or that Dioni is simply a medium intuiting pictorial messages from another place. But how else to account for Dioni’s experience of ‘something new happening’ with each new support without relying on tired notions, which Dioni repudiates, of artistic exceptionalism or ‘the artist as somehow blessed’? It is certainly possible that painting has a self-organising consciousness, a ‘certain effectivity of its own’. The fragmentary signifiers laid-out across Dioni’s paintings – the suggestions of bodies, places, sensations, desires, traumas, memories and language – are the context and catalyst for that conscious experience: a painterly consciousness that was always waiting for a substrate to wrap itself around. 

Shaune Lakin 

written on unceded Ngunawal and Ngambri Country 

i Conversation with the artist, Braidwood, NSW, 25 February 2024 

ii Rebecca Edwards, ‘Joel Arthur and Dioni Salas, Between things’, exh rev, memo 1 (2023–24), p. 245; conversation with the artist, Braidwood, NSW, 27 March 2024 

iii Conversation with the artist, 27 March 2024 

iv Conversation with the artist, 27 March 2024 

v Elizabeth Newman, ‘What makes this poem beautiful?’ (2009), reprinted in Elizabeth Newman: Texts, ed David Homewood (Naarm: Discipline, 2019), pp 129–31 

vi Conversation with the artist, 25 February 2024 

vii Conversation with the artist, 27 March 2024 

viii Dioni Salas, artist’s statement, With spent mouths, Sulman Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2023; https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/prizes/sulman/2023/30618/ (accessed 12 May 2024) 

ix Conversation with the artist, 27 March 2024 

x Maurice Tuchman, ‘Hidden meaning in abstract art’, The spiritual in abstract painting 1890–1985 (Los Angeles and New York City: Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Abbeville Press, 1981) 17–61; ‘unhistorical universalising’ comes from Meyer Schapiro, ‘Nature of abstract art’ (1937), reprinted in Modern art, 19th and 20th centuries: Selected papers (New York City, George Braziller, 1978) 185–211 

xi See, as one of the starting points for this feminist project, curators Catherine de Zegher and Hendel Tiecher’s ground-breaking exhibition and publication examining the connections between the abstraction of Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz and Agnes Martin and metaphysical cosmologies, spiritualism, and processes of cognition: 3x abstraction: New methods of drawing by Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz, and Agnes Martin (New York City: The Drawing Center, 2005) 

xii Conversation with the artist, 27 March 2024. Dioni encouraged me to read journalist Alex Blasdel’s account of ‘The new science of death: “There’s something happening in the brain that makes no sense”’, Guardian, 2 April 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/apr/02/new-science-of-death-brain-activity-consciousness-near-death-experience (accessed 27 April 2024). On the emerging scientific study of consciousness, see Oliver Burkeman’s ‘Why can’t the world’s great minds solve the mystery of  consciousness?’, Guardian, 21 January 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jan/21/-sp-why-cant-worlds-greatest-minds-solve-mystery-consciousness (accessed 27 April 2024) 

xiii Christof Koch, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic reductionist (2012), quoted in Dan Falk, ‘Is Consciousness Part of the Fabric of the Universe?', Scientific American, 25 September 2023, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-consciousness-part-of-the-fabric-of-the-universe1/ (accessed 27 April 2024) 

xiv Falk, ‘Is Consciousness Part of the Fabric of the Universe?' 

xv ‘Ultimately what we need is a satisfying scientific theory of consciousness that predicts under which conditions any particular physical system – whether it is a complex circuit of neurons or silicon transistors – has experiences. Furthermore, why does the quality of these experiences differ? Why does a clear blue sky feel so different from the screech of a badly tuned violin? Do these differences in sensation have a function, and if so, what is it? Such a theory will allow us to infer which systems will experience anything. Absent a theory with testable predictions, any speculation about machine consciousness is based solely on our intuition, which the history of science has shown is not a reliable guide.’ Christof Koch, ‘What is consciousness?’, Scientific American, 1 June 2018, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-consciousness/ (accessed 2 May 2024) 

xvi WJT Mitchell, ‘What do pictures really want?’, October 77 (Summer 1996), p. 82 

xvii Jane Bennett, Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things (Durham, USA, and London: Duke University Press, 2010), esp. pp 3–39 

xviii Bennett, Vibrant matter, pp xvi, 5 

xix Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of perception (1976), cited in Bennett, Vibrant matter, p. 5; Manuel DeLanda, A thousand years of non-linear history (1997), paraphrased in Bennett, Vibrant matter, p. 7