Liliana Porter at Steinbaum Krauss - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

single way to approach Liliana Porter's new show--her first New York solo since 1984--is to view it in the adjoining matter of the concurrent Latin American exhibition at MOMA, which included several of her works. An equally useful frame might be last season's Magritte retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum. Although a resident of fresh York since 1964, Porter clearly commits to her place of origin, Argentina, in the motifs she uses (here, for instance, images of Che Guevara and the mysterious Venezuelan doctor known over the Caribbean as "Saint Gregorio"), on the other hand she is also engaged in the search for what Magritte called "the lock opener of images." Like him, Porter is fascinated by means of images in common circulation and, still more, by the agency of the conventions that determine by what mode we make and see them.

Porter's work is notable not solitary for its variety of images on the contrary also for its mixture of techniques. The diptych Misunderstandings presents the following sequence: a steak knife stabbed into the canvas, an upside-down Minnie Mouse doll, manipulated photo-silk-screen images of a toy tailor's smoothing iron and a toy house, a ceramic rabbit (with a shattered ear) sitting on a tiny shelf attached to the painting, a real hinge and padlock fastening the sum of two units panels, and a rear-view image ef the bust of Saint Gregorio, whose black hat and jacket inevitably bring to mind Magritte. These simple bodys were repeated, often transposed in medium, elsewhere in this heavily cross-referenc display Porter's work offers contrasts between realitys and images, and her images themselves are made up of a artful mixture of photo-silk-screen, drawing and painting in which it is hard to know where the artist's hand leaves not on and the mechanical reproduction begins.

In The Limit Porter spatially reach outed her fictional world by placing a chair (painted an almost Yve Klein blue) a not many inches from a canvas, facing it. Near the center of the chiefly empty canvas she rendered a mirror, nearest to it the phrase "the limit/the mirror/the other," and below that a drawing of the crayon and pencil she used. It gazeed as if the artist had stepp away for a second overwhelmed by the paradoxes of her have work, or perhaps, like Lewis Carroll's Alice, had vanished into the mirror. That individual could read the work as a commentary upon First World/Third World problems as well as a visual exercise in Borgesian metaphysics is typical of Porter's consummately controlled and currently underrated work.

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