Liliana Porter, Situations with Levitating Rabbit

Liliana Porter – Situations with Levitating Rabbit

Liliana Porter – Untitled (with silver brush)

Liliana Porter, Situations with Levitating Rabbit Espacio Minimo gallery presents the sixth solo show at the gallery by the New York based Argentine artist Liliana Porter. From January 20th to March 5th, 2011]]>

Source: Espacio Minimo Gallery, Madrid
Situations with Levitating Rabbit is the show’s title as well as the title of the main painting that articulates theshow. In it the artist unites painting, sculpture, found objects, and installation, as well as her main referencesand obsessions like the levitating rabbit noted in the title. In Ana Tiscornia words, her works carry out ametalingüistic exercise based on the questioning of the border between reality and representation, or morespecifically, its enunciation. According to Inés Katzenstein, between 1968 and 1977, Liliana porter constructs alanguage to manifest what she discovers to be her basic philosophical concern: the question of thenaturalization of representation and its consequences. This question will always be stated from a position ofestrangement, presenting the viewer with an event that makes him or her question the usual way of relating torepresentation.

In the featured works on view, the artist insists on the importance acknowledged, since her beginnings, to thesubject of the ground. As Charles Merewheter points out, the appeal made by Porter from her earliest work hasbeen to the subject of the ground: the ground as a surface, as a support, a cover, a blank expanse, an absence.In each instance, the work undermines any appeal to a metaphysics, that is the ground as a stable terrain orfoundational structure across which identity can be mapped, or representation confirmed.

Each one of the works on canvas on view in the gallery transcends the mere pictorial medium operating like ascenario in which actions and situations take place. These spaces recreate for us impossible dialogues, gamesof presence and absence, and accurate appearances that constantly question the limits of our perception. LikeTobías Ostrander argues, Porter continually structures a participatory role for us as viewers. As readers, shepositions us as the final site for both the reception of meaning and the search for it. Her works ask us to actuallyperform the philosophical questions that inspire her and to which se relentlessly returns. The artist oftendescribes how her long-time virtual collaborator and guide, Jorge Luis Borges, spoke of the facility with whichone can become a good writer, but the extreme skill needed in becoming a talented reader. Porter’s workchallenges us to dynamically read it, to creatively further its strategies within our own spheres of interest.