Reviews
12 Itau Visual Arts Award. Interactive Exhibition Catalogue
2021
The Veil of Memory
María Carolina Baulo 2021
Liana Strasberg – The Veil of Memory
Michel Foucault’s analysis of The Other Spaces could not be more accurate when one tries to approach the work of an artist who systematically addresses that fine line between what is real and what is apparent, what is shown and what is hidden, what it is and what is insinuated, what remains and what vanishes, the physical and psychic spaces "in transit". I do not want to give an enumeration of series and works here, but rather to approach the making of Liana Strasberg highlighting in all her production a related spirit, a primitive drive that indicates the north of her creative motivations from the material, the aesthetic and the preponderance of the ideas in its reflective dimension. A visually intense work where there is no object, sculpture or installation that does not keep an almost overwhelming conceptual density. Because the symbolic contents of the works do not only manifest problems, regrets and interests that could be self-referential for the artist but are transferred to the level of the collective unconscious and in a more or less subtle way, they cross us all.
https://www.scribd.com/document/517178184/The-Veil-of-Memory-by-Maria-Carolina-Baulo
Spectral Memory. Sculpture Magazine
María Carolina Baulo
May-June 2021. Vol 40 N 3
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yfRWjtIBfI-CUGrwcSSyl3NsfmItGDX5/view?usp=sharing
Spectral Memory: A Conversation with Liana Strasberg
June 3, 2021 by María Carolina Baulo
What to remember and how to remember: these are the key concerns in Liana Strasberg’s work, which unearths and reworks images and symbols from the past in order to create what the Argentinian artist calls a “new memory file.” Strasberg takes a critical view of social and political issues, as well as historical narratives, reframing them through the lens of physical and psychological suffering. Drawing on her own memories, she translates the private into the public; her works flesh out absences and encourage viewers to re-examine personal recollection while building collective memory together. In many works, the female body becomes the protagonist in an alternative drama exploring exile and displacement, identity and fragmentation, manipulation, abuse, and loss. Created from a variety of materials, including resin, rubber, steel, and artificial blood, Strasberg’s sculptures and installations attempt to visualize what we often cannot or will not see—and what we cannot, therefore, remember—making it a necessary foundation for rethinking the present and the future.
María Carolina Baulo: Though your work refers to various bodies, individual and collective, the female body is fundamental—a territory of struggle, resistance, and overcoming. Could you talk about your approach to this powerful imagery?
Liana Strasberg: The notion of the collective body has always been present in my work. In my paintings from the late ’80s and ’90s, the body appears as an anonymous mass, migrant bodies only recognizable as a whole . . .
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yfRWjtIBfI-CUGrwcSSyl3NsfmItGDX5/view?usp=sharing
How to retrace our footsteps
Irene Jaievsky 2014
How to speak about these issues once again without falling into the same phrases, into the heavy and inexorable questions? How to generate in ourselves and in those around us that commotion facing certain irresolvable problems of the past and still inexplicable today?
Together with Liana Strasberg we will go in search of some answers.
This search is focused on the object, on the evidence, on what restores memory, on what gives presence to lost identity.
The symbols, in this case, shoes, empty of the practical, everyday meaning, are impregnated of metaphorical meanings. They are installations full of historical-philosophical significance that fulfill a legacy: to bring our view up to date.
There is where the necessary approach is fulfilled, which Liana achieves using compatible generational channels, so that through perception mechanisms these subjects today bring us closer to a moral and emotional commitment.
We are the last eyewitnesses of the testimonies of those who have lived through these situations of terror and are alive.
Artists like Strasberg, are those who are committed to the task of anchoring the events in our memory and in the memory of the future generations by means of their work.
[rojo]Irene Jaievsky[/rojo]
Women’s Museum Curator
Holocaust Museum ex-curator
Nicholas Bergman
Art, painting in particular, is an excellent medium through which to vent social and political outrage. Whereas with other media, scenes of the carnage of war, for instance, can be repellent; paint, when it is applied with skill to canvas, is seductive. Therefore, painting can retain the attention of a viewer while the artist gets her message across. Liana Strasberg’s compositions are certainly potent in their protest against violence, particularly when the victims arte women and children, as is so often the case, but they are conceived, first and foremost, in artistic terms. For instance, a group of tanks that is menacing civilians is rendered with an eye for the pattern that is formed by the raised shafts of their cannon and the rhythm that is established by their wheels.
Including both, photograph and painted images, on the same canvas is a tricky business, because the exactness and the detail rich photo image can make the painted image seem vague and simplistic. Strasberg deals with this by eschewing detail and exactitude in her painting and emphasizing bold, concise drawing. The photographs are presented like documents to verify the drawn images of awful events. That artist’s method is to alternate anonymous details that are not, in themselves, disturbing, such as a close-up of a person’s feet or hands, with a large rendering or photograph of a specific victim. Individual tragedies are pitted against large and terrible events.
Strasberg never directly confronts the viewer with violent acts. Tanks are not firing, and no one is bleeding or dying. Rather, she presents the ever present environment of hatred and violence, which is more terrifying than the acts themselves. Mug shots of prisoners, with their look of resigned anguish, speak more eloquently of the war they were caught in than the battles themselves. Her objective is to bring a human face to the anonymous misery of war and ethnic strife.
[rojo]Nicholas Bergman[/rojo]
Gallerist. Caellum Gallery. New York, NY
Albino Diéguez Videla
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