"The one who looks "

It is not idle to compare Liliana Golubinsky's painting with literature due to its strongly narrative character. Hundreds, if not thousands, of characters travel through the multidimensional space of her canvases. Over the years Liliana has had a certain preference for figures that appear recurrently, some last, others mutate and others emerge for the first time. In his work we can list the bust of a hero, the devil, the liar, the Buddha, the puppeteer, the skateboarder, animals like the rabbit, the dog, the horse, the fish or the reindeer, objects like the house, the water, the star, and many others such as those disparate elements that Jorge Luis Borges apocryphally cites in that celestial Emporium of benevolent knowledge (in The analytical language of John Wilkins, 1952). The set of actors generates a particular space and climate at the same time, a coherent scene with a dominant theme, be it water, night, nature and even underhanded criticism of Argentine political reality. Each work can be considered a conversation piece, if we understand them as a stimulus for conversation, as happens in Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights, to cite the most famous example. At the same time, Liliana is encouraged to dispense with the ups and downs of the narrative as she does in The Sea, and also in The Son of the Sea, where she denies figuration and evokes the eternity of the waters with a palette of blue. Or a combine painting (painting and objects) is allowed when it includes at the base of a painting, What was lost, the remains of the light blue and white crockery that was broken during the quarantine, that is to say that the accident mutates into construction site.
Now, beyond all this that is seen, and we underline "is seen", we are going to stop at what "is not seen" and it is the creative process, one of the most mysterious chapters in the life of an artist. A large part of the series that Liliana presents today was made in the context of confinement during the last two years, the closure was not only of the urban space but also the internal space of each one of us. We locked ourselves in our homes, there was a mental retraction that forced an unusual introspection for other times. In Liliana's case it was a very fruitful internal dialogue, little by little she withdrew the domain of the intellect and allowed intuition to advance. The workshop became a sensitive space where variations in light or the slightest sounds became interlocutors and the main interlocutor was the blank or in-process canvas. Instead of approaching the canvas with a preconceived idea, with a map of characters or situation, Liliana allowed the canvas to be fertilized with figures and colors. Something similar to what Michelangelo proposed when he said that the shape was locked in the block of marble and he only had to release it, or when Leonardo da Vinci stopped at the damp spots on the wall or the clouds in the sky to complete the shapes. This need to function as a channel, as a vehicle for archetypal forms can appear in a context of silence, intimacy and confinement; it is the positive polarity of an aspect that could be read as negative. Let us also not forget the recommendations made by the priest of surrealism, André Bretón, for automatic writing, letting words or drawings flow without inhibition or repression. The slogan reached paroxysm with the abstract expressionists of the 50s, for whom painting was pure gesture. What does this less intellectual mode of creation imply? Basically, be attentive to the internal voices and the insinuations of the blank or already painted canvas, in progress. In all these works there are various techniques, pastel, oil, watercolor, charcoal, collage that build an aqueous atmosphere, everything seems to slide, flow, flow, swim, a certain reverie is perceived, letting oneself be carried away by the images of a daytime dream. If it were music, these paintings would be a polyphony of the Renaissance, a set of voices that overlap in harmony. This is how fluid the relationship between the artist and the canvas she paints is, there is no forced scheme a priori but rather an attitude of listening before the screen of the canvas.
The one you see is the title of one of the paintings in this series, on one side there is an apparently female face with a headscarf (we think) and glasses, which could evoke the writer Victoria Ocampo. The one she sees is precisely our artist, who does not reproduce what she sees or what she thinks, but what is latent in the canvas that she seeks to manifest. The cloth is for her an enigma that she tries to decipher, Liliana becomes an agent of transmutation, a translator of a dimension as invisible as it is real.