artnexus #1

Our cover is dedicated this time to the Argentinian artist Liliana Porter, whose recent travelling exhibition (September 1990-February 1991) presented a selection of her work from the period 1968-1990. Buenos Aires, Montevideo and Santiago de Chile were the three capital cities selected for this exhibition, which showcased the suggestive and allusive world so charac­ teristic of Porter’s work. 

Since her arrival in New York in 1964, drawing, print-making and photography have been the three fundamental tools which the artist has used to construct situations in which unreality flows through everyday life, where what is apparently improb­ able suddenly becomes an imminent fact. Her familiarity with the metaphysical writings of Borges as well as her fondness for the surrealist images of Magritte have led her to create an en­ igmatic world which although rooted in easily recognizable objects successfully conjures up a wealth of possible and potential meanings. 

Porter has managed to create a universe in which, as she herself has said, “not everything has been said. This is what I call “mystery”, situations in which something seems to escape us... it is more mysterious when we can create something enigmatic with ordinary objects”.* 

*Florencia Bazzano, Portery Borges: una revelacion inminente, text included in the catalogue of the exhibition presenting the selection of works from 1968-1990, published jointly by the San Telmo Foundation, Buenos Aires, National Museum of Plastic Arts, Montevideo and the National Museum of Fine Arts, Santiago de Chile, 1990. 

IVONNE PINI