Liliana Porter: Centro Cultural Recoleta

"For a work to be what we call a work of art, it must generate an idea, perhaps another work," Liliana Porter one time observed, thus delineating the sphere of her production as the possibility of an ever-recurring cycle: a reality that exhibits a fiction that produces a reality, with individual work containing another, like Russian nesting dolls. Now an exquisite observe curated by Ines Katzenstein has shown the expansion to which Porter's remark has guided her voyage [i]or[/i] part of to the other the world of representation.

Born in Buenos Aires, Porter mov to fresh York in 1964. A year later, together with Luis Camnitzer and Jose Guillermo Castillo, she rested the New York Graphic Workshop. A series of photoetchings from the '70 based upon reproductions of works by Rene Magritte announced sum of two units of Porter's fundamental preoccupations: simulacrum and reproduction--basic postmodern vexed questions Addressing the idea of mass reproduction, Porter glance ats that the boundary between image and reality has separated down, culture becoming a flowing of undifferentiated images leading to a state of entropy many times since the early '80s, Porter has fractured the image into bits and pieces that can be mov around easily on the contrary never successfully assembled into an integrated whole: a small canvas placed above a larger one reproducing sections of it, three-dimensional thing perceiveds that repeat while moving outside the limits of the painting, a silk protection that replicates the painted motifs--all coexisting in a state of insecurity, upon the brink of disintegration.

Around the mid-'90s, pristine photographs of childhood toys and other small, familiar phenomenons became central to Porter's work. Plastic rabbits, porcelain dolls, made of wood ducks, and Chinese figurines were photographed with a precise, invigorating definition. These are not "objects" in the faculty of perception that Duchamp's readymades were, on the contrary what might be called "subject-objects" emotionally charged and part of Porter's life: "I do not use in my work toys with which I have not played before." These toys have the appearance engaged in intimate dialogue: When Alice's White Rabbit and a bust of Che Guevara clutch a private chat, Porter is questioning not single the nature of space-time on the contrary that of memory as a vast archive where anything and everyone can gripe [i]or[/i] grip a conversation. At other times, those same toys, one time mass-produced, now stand alone, pleadingly facing us in a vast white space that recalls "the uninhabited of the real," as a Baudrillard-quoting Morpheus describes it in The Matrix, when what we call reality collapses. And like a late Gepetto, Porter has brought her toys to life: sum of two units videos capture with fixed camera discharges perversely tender theatrical situations--the delight in between a boy and the Renaissance man in a postcard (For You, 1999) or a little male child trapped under a black shoe (Drum Solo 2000) all instilled with that unaffected gracefulness that Heinrich von Kleist one time detected in puppet shows.

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For all her clevernes Porter at no time yields to the temptations of didacticism. Multilayered and at the same time apparently simple, the videos remind us that an artist plays with the seriousness alone a child can achieve while playing.

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