The title of these lines come up naturally to me because they are written at the end of a century absolutely denied to thinking. I don’t only refer to the deep thought but to the one that it develops with daily nature. That lack of thinking reveals a disinterestedness which –specially expressed by the mass media- is staged in all aspects of life.

The idea of what is said here is born, by a stimulating opposition, from the paintings of Liana Strasberg, because of the first thing they propose in a thought: its direction is to the eyes of the observer.

In Strasberg, the artistic vision causes an intellectual activity, a non common fact in plastic arts these days. Her paintings are a detonator for a thought that can be centered, first in men and then, in the violence. Men –always the same- is the causal of the violent rave, in which the reason of the unreason describes him as a being determined to a systematic cruelty.

The sequence that Strasberg has painted in this decade: “Primavera de Praga”, “1939”, “Octubre Rojo”, “China del 33”, “La Escalinata de Odessa”, “Acorazado Potemkin”, “Stalingrado”, “Guerra del Golfo”, “El Salvador”, describes violent facts produced and done by men. He is the one who is in those paintings in which no political bias I found because its reason of existing is testimonial.

The curiosity of these canvas is that they provoke a similar thought –always about men- to the canvas of Candido López, so far away from Strasberg in time and aesthetic methodology.

In front of the elongated paintings of López you can reflect about the mentioned “Reason of the unreason”, and the same happens when you go over Strasberg’s work. There is, in both artistic productions something that exceeds a piece of work: it is almost the miraculous induction to a concrete thought. This shows a tough reality, the one we live since the man learnt to dominate man.

Not many times the historical situations made in plastic works of art move so much as in the case of Liana Strasberg, because she –as Cándido López did- limits herself to paint an event and describe it, and doing it she gives to the piece of work the direction that joins to the conscious of the observer.
In a time where the dramatic news occupy the mass media as well as the most frivolous, the canvas of Strasberg erect as boundary stones of history that is unconsciously done by men. Always the same man; always the producer of that “reason of the unreason” which is sort of an assumed cyclical punishment.

The soft color, the composition of perspective models, help the commotion shown by Liana Strasberg to be transformed in visual event which are understood from the conscious remembering.

From herself, appears the thought that postpone partner or definitely forgotten. The thought –and the perplexity that follows- is activated as a catharsis in these work of desperate hope in men.

[rojo]Albino Dieguez Videla[/rojo]
Argentine and International Critics of Arts Association