Buscando al ciervo rojo

Entering Liliana’s pictorial world is akin to opening the pages of *One Thousand and One Nights*—not due to any inclination toward Orientalism, but because of her passion for creating a multitude of stories and characters. To describe each one would be to add another chapter to Umberto Eco’s *The Vertigo of Lists* or to the enumerations that so fascinated Jorge Luis Borges—found in texts such as *The Aleph*, *Funes the Memorious*, or *The Analytical Language of John Wilkins*. Such is the narrative richness of her work.
Much like Hieronymus Bosch’s *The Garden of Earthly Delights*, any of Liliana’s paintings can become a true conversation piece: every figure and situation holds the potential to spark a fable or an epic. Certain figures appear in a scene—such as the man in the black cap—and seem to leap from one work to another. Animals, plants, trees, and fungi emerge within this rushing river; some recur across different compositions, while others make only fleeting appearances.
For some inscrutable reason, the figure of the stag has taken on a singular power in her more recent works. It is not a stag in the strict sense, but rather the idea of a stag manifesting in various forms. It may appear red; at times, it is a centaur whose human head bears antlers; at others, a stag with a man’s face.
Examining each painting is like leafing through those splendid medieval bestiaries—populated by phoenixes, winged sirens, griffins, dragons, and basilisks—or reading the pages of Borges’s *The Book of Imaginary Beings*. Yet, Liliana neither illustrates nor reproduces any of those existing repertoires. Each animal—or "entity," to avoid being too specific—springs from her own imagination, her dreams, and her nightmares.
It was Alejandro Grossato, a distinguished scholar of symbology, who examined the metamorphoses between the human and the animal. In the chapter dedicated to the "stag-man," he traces this image from the cave paintings at Trois-Frères to Celtic metalwork, exemplified by the famous Gundestrup Cauldron.
In the Christian tradition, both Saint Hubert and Saint Eustace encounter a stag with a radiant crucifix glowing between its antlers, accompanied by a voice calling upon them to forsake worldly vanities and follow the path of Christ.
The stag is also frequently associated with shamanic practices in numerous cultures, while in Greek mythology, it is linked to Artemis, the goddess of the hunt. It was she who transformed Actaeon into a stag—only for him to be devoured by his own hounds—as punishment for having gazed upon her nakedness.
Thus, the stag that traverses Liliana’s paintings seems to encapsulate a complex web of symbolic resonances: a creature of forests and dreams, a figure of transformation, and a bridge between the human and the animal. Above all, however, it is a presence that eludes definitive interpretation, reaffirming the open-ended, unsettling, and deeply imaginative nature of her pictorial universe.