Saggi Critici » The Magic of Existence.
di Tiziana Conti
Walter Benjamin affirms memory is complementary to experience and the ”eternal return” is an attempt lo join eternity and temporariness: Lena Liv’s Works remind me of this thought; they seem to be suspended on the “ridge” which divides – in an imperceptible way – the past from the present.
The artist is animated by an extraordinary conceiving capacity and lets defile the images of the past which bind themselves with the future’s ones: the image of the past, to which Liv always returns as to a pure, uncontaminated place, fluctuates hastily and ge(s fixed in a “now-time” (Jezt-Zeit), which is neither empty nor homogeneous, but a stream, a “continuum”.
As a consequence every element becomes a monument of the con-science, in the continuous search of traces: traces of life, of spirit, of history. In the time’s suspension shines the contrast between memory and oblivion: they are not the extremes of a final laceration, but two poles between which the “ontic” being of man spreads out.
Memory is unfathomable: Paul Celan says everything is struck in there and recovers its original meaning. It’s possible lo lei reality blow up and find out latent bonds, finds of a collective experience, which has to be shared. One can take possession of the fugitive remembraces, change them into a pulsating energy, which gives force to life in its restless wandering. Oblivion is a figure of great intensity, the centre of an unrevealing mystery, an inexhaustible cypher. Kafka affirms only the enigma remains, when everything is forgotten.
Liv catches the primary enigma, which is identical with the difficulty of life distressed by anxiety and by the “cura” for the things. At the same lime she communicates a particular form of melancholy, which shows us the right way beyond the experience fluctuation. The role exchange of memory and oblivion emphasizes the “word” as the only mean to escape “silence”.
If we examine the artist’s works, also from a technical point of view, the black colour can be interpreted as the colour of “lack” where all the contrasts are neutral. Darkness is also a reflection possibility, a recovering of the spirit. Liv works with prints of old photographs: she lakes out of them some details, fragments which often repeat the same themes -children, nuns- and form inextricable bonds. The context becomes complexer by the artist’s direct intervention on the hand-made paper and subsequently in the creation of a “frame”: a closing structure, a hinge. It is of iron, a poor and anonymous everyday mate-rial. She often puts into the inside objects. Some examples: The wait. A table prepared for guests -will they comes?- An abandoned cup. The table’s disposition toward the black wall gives a sense of an infinite vista. In the black: A circle, a perfect closing of children, equidistant.
Inside the circle there is the magic of a blue ball, which keeps the spell alive. Realty associates and dissociates continuously; it is impossible to decide what is illusory and what is true. Maya’s veil lets place only to transient, fascinating, urgent apparitions: stigmata which life inflicts on LIS, a growth of consciousness. Out of a former life emerge correspondences with which one has to compare oneself so as to sublimate pain. Consequently, Liv’s works are a language, in the sense of Heidegger: an authentic revelation of the Being who defines destiny.
Tiziana Conti