Ruth Benzacar Galería de Arte inaugurates its 2024 season by presenting Liliana Porter, with this exhibition that unfolds in the most diverse languages -painting, sculpture, installation, drawing- overcoming the limits with which the search for purity of the media once suffocated them.
The exhibition will be displayed in the main hall of the gallery and will be accompanied by a text
by Graciela Speranza.
_
By Graciela Speranza
Beginnings are pure promise; endings, pure loss. Something definitively ends in the conclusion of a story and, although this is where meaning is defined, in our most intimate experience there are no closures—everything continues. Hence, the longing to tell stories without endings, even at the risk of them losing meaning.
True to that desire for an open world, like life itself, Liliana Porter’s work has long been a world of unfinished tales. Not in the sense of tragically unfinished works, like Schubert’s Symphony No. 8—the “Unfinished”—nor impossibly ambitious ones, like Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet, or even deliberately unfinished ones, like Michelangelo’s Slaves, the three portraits of his wife that Manet knowingly left incomplete, or Warhol’s paint-by-number series. Unfinished, in Porter’s way, means freed from the tyranny of closure, from the fixed rules of didactic, consoling or tragic narratives—and therefore suspended in the imminence of something that may or may not happen, open to the imagination of the viewer.
It’s no coincidence, then, that Porter now invites us into her mute fable-world through a screen, much like Alice through the looking glass, with a series of animated tales created in collaboration with Ana Tiscornia, aptly titled Unfinished Tales. Snippets of text cut from old books or magazines hint at a narrative—“A happy encounter”, “Though it seemed strange”—pose metaphysical questions—“Who are you?”, “What will become of me?”—or flirt with an ending, but her carefully cast figurines frustrate answers or barely suggest them through the rhythm of the montage and the music that animates them. For instance: do the dancing lovers ultimately part? And where is that eclectic group of travellers being dragged off to? Will a man and a woman finally meet amidst a labyrinth of diverging paths? Sometimes all it takes is a close-up for these miniatures to overcome their inertness, their porcelain stillness, and speak with their gaze. But what do they say? In the void left by meaning and resolution, the absurd often slips in—or simple awe for those handcrafted doubles of the adult world that give material form to childhood fantasy. What’s never absent is that applied phenomenology with which Porter’s situations—“touching, trivial, and at the same time sublime”, as Claire Bishop once wrote—transform the banality of her trinkets, knick-knacks, and figurines. Nor is humour ever lacking. As one final irony, the classic “The End” appears here only after the credits, when everything has been definitively… unfinished.
Yet these stories without endings are just beginning on screen, and Porter’s world then expands into three dimensions. It unfolds not only through a wide array of media—painting, sculpture, installation, drawing—but breaks free of the limits once imposed by the modernist pursuit of purity. A toy frigate seems about to sink beneath a monumental painted wave; a tangle of real thread becomes infinite in a drawn fabric; a tiny man confronts the Sisyphean task of drilling a gallery wall again and again. Without narrative closures, time also expands, leaving characters adrift in a limbo without calendars, clocks, flashbacks, fast-forwards or even historical timelines.
Porter’s miniature universe also longs to outgrow its scale, embracing the challenge of large formats—as if now it were promising an epic saga, a nineteenth-century novel, a multi-season TV series, a poetic summa: an unfinished tale stretching across eight metres of platform, waiting to be assembled by the viewer on the move. It begins with a woman sweeping—a central figure if we consider the title—paradoxically significant despite her mere five centimetres in height. But what sort of epic could be inspired by a woman absorbed in a trivial, domestic task, entirely removed from the memorable exploits of romantic heroines or the empowered women with a room of their own? And yet her stature rises when we consider the titanic feat she faces: sweeping away the debris of past stories, dealing with those that resist fading—persevering wanderers, uncanny dialogues, lost divas—and even attempting to erase, with her miniature broom, the immense chaos of a disjointed world that eventually (inconclusively) takes on real dimensions and breaks out of its fictional realm: chairs, violins, even a chandelier someone forgot to switch off. Just as with the screen, the viewer is left to imagine what story could possibly contain this accumulation of disconnected fragments—or thread together a tale that resists closure in its infinite dispersal. Porter’s world seems intent on accommodating everything—a bold ambition that may, in itself, be a clue to its elusive meaning.
In her “situations” reigns the implicit welcome described by the Algerian philosopher: “Come in, yes, whoever you are, whatever your name, your language, your gender, your species—be you human, animal, or divine.” Porter’s work, a grand theatre of hospitality, welcomes the other, the different, the foreign, without question. It crosses thresholds and borders, creating a utopian non-place—a geography of proximity and intimacy that reunites what history, religion and ideology have divided, reconciling humans with other species in a silent exchange of gifts where language temporarily falls silent. Hopeful, it also conserves remnants, fragments, shards. Who knows? In some future story, it might all be pieced back together.
If Unfinished Tales were to bear an epigraph, it could well be these verses by Roberto Juarroz:
“Perhaps a language for endings
requires the total abolition of other languages,
the unshakable synthesis
of scorched earths.
Or perhaps to invent a language of interstices,
one that gathers the minimal spaces
interwoven between silence and speech
and the unknown particles without greed.”
Perhaps, after all, her tales are not unfinished in the strictest sense. It may well be that “between silence and speech and the unknown particles”, Porter has found her own language for endings.
