Liliana Porter's six-decade "Journey"

With a steadily expanding international career that began in the mid-1960s when, together with Luis Camnitzer and José Guillermo Castillo, she created the New York Graphic Workshop , completely redefining the technique of printmaking, Liliana Porter (Buenos Aires, 1941) seems to have conquered all realms of the art world. However, she had a pending issue with her country: to present six decades of production in a retrospective exhibition that would move like a pendulum between yesterday and today, a goal that she achieved with Travesía , her second experience at the Malba museum.

His first time at this museum was with The Man with the Axe and Other Brief Situations , which opened in 2013. He created a monumental installation in which a tiny man destroys everything in his path, even the unimaginable, while contemplating the possibility of collecting, cleaning, spilling, and building. This same work would later be exhibited at the 2017 Venice Biennale , an event that allowed people from all over the world to understand Porter's power to captivate through expressions that start from the micro and extend to the macro.

Regarding the enormous challenge of planning a retrospective of such a productive and current artist, Porter reflects: “Given that I haven't lived in Argentina since 1964, I'm very excited to have this unique opportunity for my work to be understood here from a broader perspective . The title, like the selection of works curated by Agustín Pérez Rubio, allows for cross-readings and interpretations that go beyond chronological order, which I consider a great success.”

Regarding his early years, he explains that after entering the New York circuit , he discovered new possibilities for expanding the notion of printmaking . "With NYGW, I began to think from the concept and not just the technique, and I realized that the idea of making crumpled paper and the action of crumpling seemed magical to me, uniting illustration with fact. Since then, my work has always included the possibility of uniting the image with reality and the limit with the virtual, a theme that I seem to have not yet exhausted."

He said this during the opening, referring to the installation "Arruga" that he made with the NYGW in 1969 in Caracas and Santiago de Chile, and with which Pérez Rubio felt it was important to start the exhibition, since it is "a participatory installation that introduces the possibility of taking ownership of the space and breaking away from the white cube" and where you can take a piece of paper, roll it into a ball, and throw it away.

In that first room, it's hard not to wonder what the young Liliana was like in relation to the artist she is today. " I'm still the same . In the beginning, when we started working with Luis and Guillermo, we felt a connection to certain thoughts and ideals aligned with the times we were living in. And while new concerns and interests arise over the years, the essence remains the same."

There are also things that aren't so obvious, yet they're still actions he does all the time, like drawing . "There aren't many small drawings in the exhibition, something I do a lot of these days in Rivadavia notebooks I bring back from Argentina when I visit. These are traditions that never get lost ."

Porter's works are filled with tiny figures performing mundane yet massive tasks due to their sheer size, such as sewing, painting, collecting, repairing, and contributing beyond the inevitable possibility of destruction the world throws at them. Characters also appear as representations of utopias or idealizations , sociopolitical references to antagonistic capitalism or communism, such as Mickey Mouse, Che Guevara, or Mao, presented as souvenirs. Images corrupted by commercialism and the obsession with memorabilia.

The artist's political commitment has always been in the spotlight, and it is included in Travesía in both direct and subtle ways, with pieces from different eras, but where signs, elements, and insignia are repeated. " I'm interested in memorabilia, where things are trivialized, transformed, and at the same time take on different meanings depending on the viewer," she asserts.

Porter appropriates the historical theme of the still life and creates scenes where these objects, part of collective memory and personal life, coexist, transforming them into a social mirror. "And let's see where we see ourselves reflected," reflects Perez Rubio.

The connection between stages, series, and moments like a large spiderweb is reminiscent of one of the exhibition's installations , where a small woman in a red dress creates a gigantic web of wool of the same color, slowly but surely taking over the surrounding space. In the museum hallway, a tiny man paints a chair, while in another room, a woman tends a garden of broken dishes, and a final woman sweeps a long line of blue pigment.

Returning to the beginning, in one of the first rooms , a wooden clock ticks, its hands still and numbers blurred . This is no small sign, considering that time is a crucial factor that moves forward and stops, creating subtle tensions that these scattered moments evoke.

How does time pass in Porter's work? In this regard, it's hard to ignore his interest in the literature of Jorge Luis Borges . "I'm interested in how he addresses the subject matter and describes certain situations where one enters the narrative and suddenly makes a comment about grammar, placing us on the border between reality and fiction . That fascinates me."

Reaching the end of this long journey , there is a dark room with movie theater seats . A moment of pause and silence that highlights another facet Porter has been developing since 1999, one that involves video, music, and collaborative work . Here, eight videos he made with Ana Tiscornia and Sylvia Meyer are projected, amplifying the voices surrounding his work.

"I started considering this format after a little Pinocchio doll I bought in Chinatown that would bang its timpani when you wound it up. When it finished, a silence would form that seemed fantastic to me but that I couldn't represent. It could only be explained through the noise that came before. So I got inspired to make video and discovered that there were things that conflicted me , like the fact that the dolls were so small they looked gigantic on screen, until I understood that the mind understands their true size no matter how they are projected, or the importance of music, which can make you see other things. Since then, the three of us have made many videos and plays."

This exhibition hides a contradictory feeling between strength and fragility, power and surrender in front of the works, as if the viewer understood they had the capacity to alter the situation and yet would never dare to do so. Faced with this somewhat absurd proposition, Porter confesses: “The truth is, it had never occurred to me. What did happen at the Venice Biennale was that someone added a little doll to the installation . Just one among so many people who passed through there over so many months.”

Anecdotes like this recall the feeling of distance and closeness with the active, devoted viewer, a thought similar to the need for change he felt in the 1960s and which continues to be relevant today. It's the permanence of rebellion that gives strength to all of his work. Evidently, Porter was right; she's still the same as always.

Travesía , by Liliana Porter until October 13 at Malba (Av. Pres. Figueroa Alcorta 3415).