Cuestion de Actitud

A Chinese emperor asked all the painters of his kingdom to approach the best painting ever painted to him. During weeks hundreds marched past before him, thousands of artists who tried to impress him with pictures of women with insinuating smiles, landscapes saffroned by the twilight, fantastic flying dragoons and pagodas trimmed by the silver plated light of the moon. The emperor watched with great and rested eyes, but nothing seemed to comfort him, his lips were sealed by indifference. Until one day, when, he who appeared was a painter with a picture of frightful storms, hurricaned winds, roars of collapsing bridges and rivers of mud, all which, with monstrous horror, destroyed everything along their paths. Sweat ran along the emperor’s spine as he was in front of the most beautiful painting of his kingdom. Neither courtesans, princess, crew members nor officials of their army understood. With the solemn attitude of his rank, the emperor explained that in the middle of all that windstorm, he could see how a bird calmed its pigeons in its nest as it fed them. That emperor knew that that was the true beauty, the power to keep the calm amidst the gray opacity of the storm, the power to continue listening to the own melody in the middle of the storm roars. Liliana Golubinsky’s latest paintings involve urban storms, a chaotic encounter and mix-up of dozens of citizens flagellated by daily violence. Their figures fly in the pictorial space crowded around by urban happening, like in medieval painting where several scenes happen simultaneously. The perspective of her pictures is not geometric, and several codes of representation cohabit there: a figuration near the comic strip (not being so), abstract expressionism and writings. The painting is clearly narrative, although non-lineal, and the coexistence in the urban space is a significant knot. Liliana portrays her daily space, the one of all the Buenosaireans and by extension, the one of the inhabitants of great metropolis. To cross a street can become a titanic fight, the zebra crossing in an incomprehensible hieroglyphic and the traffic-light in a useless still, because nobody seems to respect the laws of urban coexistence. Norms of basic security, as the operation of radars in an airport is amended by the skills of experienced pilots or by the action of the ¨Divine Grace¨. Nobody seems to know how it is coexisting with the other. The written phrases in the pictures are incomprehensible, and this goes to tone with the “era of communication” that has generated a society and an “exaggerated selfish autism”. To all, it matters to speak to them, but to nobody to listen. The women are naked and the man, dressed, as if the first, where much more exposed to the hurricaned winds of daily life. There are dogs everywhere, but not as a fidelity symbol, but as an annoying, disturbing animal, as it appears in ¨The Crazy¨(arcane without number of the tarot marsellés), biting the traveller’s calves and hindering him to walk. There is a constant in all the scenes: the balance (or non-balance) of the personages, some making pirouettes of bull-leaping (jump to the bull, like in those minoica paintings), others hanging of trapezes, mounting cars or airplanes in the way one climbs a skate-board, and there’s a fight between the ¨Yogic asana¨ and the Soleil Circus . Liliana’s pictures are like apexes of that painting which has frightened the emperor’s subjects away, the artist shows us the daily chaos to which all of us are accustomed, without realizing, because the threshold of tolerance to violence raises more and more. In those paintings, there’s no calm bird feeding its pigeon. The personages haven’t still found the calm and the balance, they are in search and continue supporting the ups and downs of the incommunication, the non-respect by the other, the indifference and the lack of solidarity. Nevertheless, the paintings are not denunciation or resignation, the sparkling spirit of each one speaks to us of a way to travel in this journey. It seems that Liliana’s personages haven’t yet come to inner peace or fullness, but each one of her paintings transmits an infinite confidence to us; everything is a question of attitude.