Liliana Moro – Àncóra

Just a letter to change everything. Just a letter to change shape, meaning, and direction.
There is never just one choice in things. And art knows this well.
Liliana Moro knows it too. She has focused most of her research on the dual nature of things, seeking, perhaps without ever willing to find, a balance that a loss of bearings needs.

What are our bearings today? I don’t think there is a single definition and if there is one, it is certainly multi-faceted and subjective. Always true and always different.
Liliana Moro has crossed post-modernism with her elegant and intense thought and in the last decade has produced a series of works that have dissected contemporary society in its darkest or most hidden dynamics, maintaining a contemplative and never emotional detachment that has allowed her to reinterpret certain complex elements of life, looking at them through a magnifying glass, as well as to find a contact with the world around us, opening her to what is happening or may happen. Hers is a view that is definitely not indulgent, but nonetheless filled with great humanity.

Àncóra is an effort at times painful, mediated by doubt, by awareness, by rigor, in which it is easy to find an existential malaise towards attitudes and feelings such as: limits, crossing limits, borders, and instability. No one of us likes to realize that we are fragile, lost, and out of control.
These are the very feelings that Liliana Moro has transformed into objects, in an absolutely unpredictable effort, materializing something that is not visible.
Moro’s works for Àncóra are in a constant tension between representation and sensation. It is an oxymoron that takes shape in the constant contradiction between void and fullness, between darkness and light, between movement and stasis, between everything and nothing.

Recovering the semantics of many of her works, Liliana Moro identifies contrasts in recalling childhood objects, forcing spectators to go deeper in their reflection, despite her apparent lightness. So a life jacket, an air chamber that means safety and salvation, becomes instead a boulder laden with responsibilities, an unsettling object, deprived of its potential as well as of its form that hides fatigue in its folds.
A life jacket that does not save echoes a strong contrast, made such by the artist who ideally fills it weighing it down with the difficulties of life. Through her breath trapped in concrete, Moro gives us a measure of what people experience inside themselves today, in a permanent contrast with a present that is caught between appearance and being, an ambiguous magma, an existential substance without precise contours.

There is a recurring uncertainty that repeats itself throughout Moro’s installation, where chandeliers of different origins point beams of light to the floor. It is not a diffused light, but the light projected from chandeliers that are suspended face down, an earthly and all but transcendental light. A light that shields, that reassures in its contact with the earth, which illuminates where it is needed, not to fall, not to get lost. A light that does not strike and that in its simplicity shows the way.

A light that changes and becomes color, a captivating light, a memory of “modernity,” the neon. Àncóra, a word that in Italian is an oxymoron, a word that is an object, a word that recalls. One meaning is that of “anchor,” an artifact placed strategically like a siren that draws without sound, that once again breaks away from its function of signal. A word that does not have a single meaning. It is double, distorted, a word possible in both its expressions.
A noun that describes an object that holds and stabilizes, while as an adverb meaning “again,” it defines what endures in time or space, what is in the making. A subtle semantic limit like the glass that makes up the neon and gives it a specific weight equal to its instability.

It all comes back; everything is possible in Liliana Moro’s representation, constantly hovering between visual and ideal boundaries, replicated and distorted. A lightness and a movement that change perspectives and dynamics. A lightness that Moro captures in pinwheels, in the cheerful entertainment as they move through the air, in the variable yet continuous journey around an axis, guided by the wind. In the rustling of their perpetual spinning to nowhere, they represent perhaps the journey of humankind into the unknown.

Liliana Moro closes Àncóra with an epilogue that in the complexity of a hypertext language contemplates a collective experience that makes everyone powerless, that stuns for the fierce purity of the images, a collage as snapshots directly borrowed from the news, from history, from life. Geometric and light representations in their graphical representation that tell the inexorable odyssey of migrants trapped in large ships on the go, on the run, without a destination. Unwanted people, bounced back, disappointed, at the mercy of fate and the sea, at the mercy of time. Holding on to long poles like pinwheels in the wind, nameless people seeking the light, salvation. They sparkle in their golden blankets, scream like the siren of a ship, pointing out their right to attention, to dignity. An exodus that affects us all because it is the sign of the drift of a humanity unable to fend for itself.

Liliana Moro stuns spectators freezing them with a narrative that in the rigor of its grammar, hides a deep and visceral soul that is deeply aware of its gravity.