Liliana Golubinsky

Opening her eyes, a March 9th, 1954, Liliana Golubinsky looked into the stage of her days for the first time: the city of Buenos Aires. Cosmopolitan, tumultuous, inhabited by unequal characters and full of unrealistic situations, the metropolis offered itself as a field of exploration for a girl, eager to create her wonderland.
Her childhood was spent in the neighborhoods of Villa del Parque and Paternal, where her father owned a sewing- machine- shop. Shy and introverted- did not like acting at school or talking in public-, she used to seek refuge in the paper sheet. In her moments of solitude, she would paint and draw with color pencils, chalk and watercolors. Her parents, in disbelief of the artistic job, thought their daughter´s decision to enroll in Fine Arts was a temporary hobby. But her momentum and self-confidence prevailed. In 1972 she entered the Augusto Bolognini Fine Arts Academy, where she studied for four years and then specialized in the Prilidiano Pueyrredón National Fine Arts School. The geometrician Ary Brizzi, one of her teachers, taught her the vibrations of colors. One afternoon at school, Liliana expressed her fear to forget what she had learned. Brizzi replied with a question: does the baby who already learned to walk, forget about walking after learning to sit down?
At the age of 20 she married Eduardo Krolovetzky, her lifetime companion. Pertinacious, she planned the birth of her children in the summer months so as not to interfere with her studies. In 1978 Guido was born and Lucila, in 1981. But Liliana spent no day without painting. As she changed diapers while admiring Toulouse-Lautrec´s artwork, her living-room was turning into a small workshop.
She began to frequent the studio of the painter Miguel Dávila.
The commitment and generosity of her mentor allowed her to stay for eight years, from 1978 to 1986.Today, Sasha Dávila and she often say they are children of the same father.
She shared the workshop with Juan Lecuona, Silvana Blasbalg, Ana Erman and Inés Vega, among others, who went in search of their own aesthetic. By that time, she used to drive a metallic blue Renault 4. One day, she stops at the traffic- lights on the way to her workshop and a passing- by man in white coat and hat, touches her car and lifts his thumb with a nod. It was Antonio Seguí. In 1980 she makes her first solo exhibition in the former Lirolay Gallery. Her paintings go through various themes and periods which are torn between inquiries upon the form and the plasticity of colors. It is experimentation time.
The year was 1984. The Colon Theatre conducted an unusual experience: the dancers executed steps and pirouettes while the artists were drawing ballet sketches in the darkness. Liliana excelled for the agility and the development of her drawings. She won the first round award. Excited, she climbed the stage in the hand of the dancer Gerardo Finn and the then theatre director, Cecilio Madanes, handed the distinction to her. She already had the Cecilia Grierson Award of the National Painting Salon, which she obtained in 1982.
During the 90s she painted landscapes of imagination, combining a lot of stuff with multiple horizons. López Anaya stressed, “ has revaluated color, a color that becomes more and more saturated”. Always attentive to the manifestations of her hidden memory, magical events and unexpected appearances of her unconscious mind come to meet her. In 1992, she sends a work entitled “Swiss landscape” to the Tucuman Provincial Salon, which was curiously integrated to another contest: Hall of Landscape. She travels to Tucuman after winning the First Prize of the Acquisition Landscape Timoteo Navarro Hall. While going for a stroll in the city, she stops at Cerro San Javier. To her surprise, she discovered that the landscape she had painted was the same as the one she was glimpsing: the valley, the houses, the church, the tombs, the trees. It was not Switzerland, it was Tucuman. At the opening, that same evening, the painter Luis Felipe Noé watched the work closely and wondered, “Why does a Tucumán landscape have these little Swiss flags?”
“The artwork is necessarily subjective and essentially autobiographical. Only the true artists manage to make that subjectivity objective so that everyone else participates in it”, Fermin Févre, her philosophy professor, said in the preface to his 1993 exhibition at Centoria Gallery.
In that period, Liliana writes: “when I closed my eyes I saw the wide sea, deep blue, scrambled blue, and pink, green, lilac lights. ( … ) The wind hitting my face made me held my breath, the strained, vibrant sailings of the boats … I flew in the air”. Her works emerge in the naval battles, the soldiers, the processions, the cartography and the horses. A space invaded by the use of collage, drawing and painting. “A timeless Crusade is taking place on printed geographic planes in whose overlapping, Jerusalem can face the coast of Ecuador and the giant rivers resemble an Amazonian Nile or an African Mississippi”, in the words of Albino Diéguez Videla. Without any orthodoxy, nor premeditation, Liliana would build maps out of imaginary territories using guidebooks and taking possession of storybook and history characters.
As a girl, she had a wooden horse called Tatan, which suddenly disappeared and which she never saw again. But he returns in her artworks, where either wheeled or legless or on wooden platforms, horses begin to appear. Tatan, Tatan. In the preface to his 1995 exhibition, Raúl Santana said that Liliana “seems to recreate the pristine experience of children, (…) behaves like a child in the large canvases playing to locate her horses and her toy soldiers in order to kick off the battle.”
And there were lyrics, too. An automatic writing which referred, more than narrate. It is a reinforcement of the incomprehensibility of the battles that occurred again and again. As in child stories that adults write, there is laughter, games and jumps, but also, truculence, impact and shock. Eluding sarcasm, she created a world of irony.
The new millennium made her owner of a workshop. She used to be so engrossed in her work, that when someone phoned her, she would say:”within an hour, I´ll be back in Buenos Aires”. The floor started getting crowded with beings that literally escaped from her paintings. Thus, the character her paintings would acquire expressed itself: a heterogeneous figuration of characters. Alberto Pío Rosales, a friend who visited her at that time, imagined Liliana “resting in a workshop guarded by a group of angels, who, sacred number seven, transmit the peace of these life battles, just as only they can do”. With the paint of her palette, she draws elephants, goats, mythological beings, dogs. Pompeii has moved to the neighborhood of Belgrano.
One evening in FOA House, an architect gave her the idea of stools. She painted them with marker, acrylic and pastel, distributing her characters all over their fabrics and their wooden legs. She managed to manufacture up to six stools per day, painting night and day, without any assistants. From the ceiling to the floor, the workshop was filled with stools. The news reached Spain, where they became so fascinated that they began to import them: the ones that went to Barcelona had a green ribbon and the ones that went to Madrid had a yellow one. Thus, she was summoned to make samples in these two cities and in Bilbao, too.
At the ArteBA fair she exhibited stools and screens. There, the renowned gallery owner Natalio Jorge Povarché got interested in her work. Since the year 2003- and even today- she exhibits in Rubbers Gallery. She changes the collage and the cutouts for the drawing of her citizen-characters. In 2008, Julio Sánchez headlined his preface to his exhibition Question of attitude in this way: “The perspective of her paintings is not geometric, and various codes of representation cohabit: a figuration close to the comic strip (without being that), an abstract expressionism and writings”. Liliana looks, sees, watches and paints. Crowds, swimmers, devils, heroes and heroines of everyday existence move from one place to the other all above and below the pictorial space.
She is disturbed by another kind of contemplation, a more delicate one. On her journeys she sees the human landscape. She sees the small, subtle gestures of interpersonal relationships. Two friends talking, a lady crossing the street, cars piled up in transit, groups celebrating. Figures saying things to each other in the titles of her works: I assault you, you assault me, I am the woman of your dreams, It´s not me, it´s you, Look into my eyes and My wound started bleeding again. Daily murmurs containing the value of the anecdote. “The images are populated by meanings, thoughts, associations and memories” reflects Norberto Griffa in his exhibition Visions, in 2010. In that year, she made the exposition Reflections of my Daily Life in The Americas Collection Gallery in Miami. There, she confessed that she never works with previous sketches. There are characters she does not remember to have made because “they come from within”, the images cross her mind as she wanders around the city, they impregnate with such a force , that end up unleashing a myriad of lines and colors in the fabric.
There is no oblivion but representation of what has been lived in constant flow. The figures emerge so quickly that, many times, she wonders if what she has just drawn was not done by someone else.
Time for confidences, her exhibition in 2012, affirms the mobile nature of the characters in her canvases. There are artworks that are altered with the passing of time. The figures leap from one picture to another and, as in the polyptychs, the rhythm of the story becomes even messier. She composes her paintings on surfaces of color: blue, brown, gray, light-blue linens. She denotes a lyrical sarcasm in her fabrics, which the critic Nelly Perazzo could glimpse in the foreword of the catalogue.
At first glance, Liliana is a quiet, cheerful, relaxed person. Perfecting the look a little, one discovers a restless, anxious person, unable to put up with waiting. Suspended in the tragicomedy, she ventures to give an account of daily actions in a children´s story fashion. The parable, however, is clear. There are no double meanings. The stereotypes that we used to find in the stories for children seem to come to life in the end. Because, many times, the artist admits to have met people who formerly lived on the surface of her artworks. Her most recent exhibition at the Rubbers Gallery, year 2014, carried the accurate title of Tune and spell.
Liliana lives, paints and dreams in Buenos Aires. With her eyes open to the world, she abandons contemplation everyday and, like Alice by Lewis Carrol, “sitting with her eyes closed, almost imagined herself in Wonderland, although she knew she only had to open them in order to see everything transformed into a dull reality”. Or rather, she just had to paint to transform fantasies and dreams into a wonderful reality.