For almost nine minutes, the figure of the bride dominates the unique panorama. O Grande Dia (2023) gains in dramaticity by being imbued with multiple meanings through Adagietto, movement 4, of Symphony No. 5 by Gustav Mahler (1860-1911). Undoubtedly one of the most beautiful compositions in symphonic history, written by a genius completely overwhelmed by his passion for Alma Schindler (1879-1964), it synthesizes the creation so skillfully handled by the artist, with highs, lows, tones marked by nuances and perhaps that fulcrum that Mahler said, that music should represent the universe (and all its complexities). It is worth noting that the Czech-born composer would marry Alma (the union, according to historical accounts, proved far from placid). However, in the performance of Liane Roditi (Rio de Janeiro, 1967), there is a construction that seems to subvert possible harmonic and comfortable readings. The artist’s own wedding dress evokes a great weight. Its no longer vibrant colors connect to elements of memory that do not seem to hold the most optimistic reminiscences. In minimal choreography, the artist’s body finally seems to gain contours of freedom, not without previous processes of conflict and pain. The performance of Samantha Tiussi on the piano also contributes to the audiovisual work bringing more disturbances and gaps, in a movement of destabilization, than a linear and expected reading/interpretation/observation could provide.
Thus, O Grande Dia serves both as an introduction to the artist’s multifaceted production and perhaps summarizes Roditi’s non-reductionist and refined practice, who chooses to deal with subjects that are far from simple, but with approaches that distance themselves from pamphlets and eschew literalness. The initial training in dance and the recent foray into contemporary visuality have, gradually, forged a mature, polysemic body of work that makes use of the versatility of languages and supports, such as video art, performance, photography, drawing, and three-dimensional work, among others.
In an emerging production, since 2019 (the year when she began the course Practical-Theoretical Issues of Contemporary Painting at Parque Lage, with Bruno Miguel and Luiz Ernesto), Roditi’s body of work has been settling – however, without static conformations of forms and concepts – into a vigorous hybridity of means, which can be analyzed with some transformations in the approaches and materiality of the works. Broadly speaking, there are evident movements of dissolution, construction of strangeness in dealing with alterity, and the use of the artist’s own body as a predominant attempt at dialogue.
It is somewhat comforting to look at the artist’s early pieces, especially the videos. In them, we can find Philippe Dubois’s so precise and nowadays paradigmatic praise of such language. “Indeed, ambiguity is in the nature of this medium of representation, at all levels, to the point that everything in it ends up gaining a kind of double face. When we speak of video, do we know exactly what we are talking about? A technique or a language? A process or a work? A means of communication or an art? An image or a device?”1, analyzes the French theorist.
Thus, the viewer can perceive the mixture of freshness and simplicity in the devices shared in these audiovisuals, while a grammar with rigor – since there is no concession to advertising, the unbridled consumption of images, and the solipsism of this somewhat alienated, somewhat refractory receiver – enables a non-static approach to the complexities of now. Like a mythological Janus, with one face projecting the future and the other behind without trampling on essential memories.
Despertar (2022), Cipó (2022), and especially Sal (2022), developed during the residency at Kaaysá, in Boiçucanga, northern coast of São Paulo, reach a punctum, to use a Barthesian concept of the photographic language so well worked by Roditi, it should be noted. In Sal, this plunge of the woman-protagonist in a small black garment that merges with the unknown oceanic darkness/liquidity, noisy and indomitable, brings this scope of the artist’s disassembling and undoing. In this sense, there are also photographic versions of the video works and pieces made specifically for the medium, such as Hera (2022), Enterro Sem Despedida (2022), and Ocultar Revelando (2023). In the latter, the presence of the ghostly is already sketched, attesting to the strangeness mentioned earlier but which distances an initial reading close to the sinister and launches the piece more towards enigma, mystery, leaving it far from impermeable and very closed configurations.
The series O Sustento confirms the transit of Roditi’s work through the uncommon, which precisely finds unfoldings through the three-dimensional language. Solitário (2023), presented in the group exhibition Corpo: Entre Suporte, Gesto e Dispositivo, exhibited in the experimental space Fonte in the same year, centers the appeal on this 9-meter-long sisal rope, in which a quartz stone is suspended 1.60 meters from the ground. In this duality between earthy and evanescent, material and immaterial, terrestrial and elevated, firm and fluid, etc., the installation requires an active audience to overcome a primeval strangeness or repulsion. The artist explores the line, as in a drawing that invades space and claims existence, sometimes sparse sometimes robust, in other experiments beyond the bidimensional, such as Lilith (2024) and Fiando (2023). In the latter, hairpins and hair strands announce a materiality not neglected in subsequent works.
While there is this immersion in space and the importance of the phenomenological is clear, a recent series, Corpo em Movimento (2024), deals with such poetic vectors and utilizes the potentialities of two-dimensional languages, such as drawing. Through soft pastel on Canson paper, with heights that can measure up to 60 cm, the artist’s gesture in the construction of these vortices, these black holes on an intimate scale, provokes the audience in a direction both elusive and relentless, in a duality between being attracted and repelled. Very promising is the latest development of pieces in the series, with the use of charcoal and a 1:1 scale.
Finally, there is a recent phase of works in which Roditi involves, not without risk, her own body or parts of it with various materials. Hair and braids are not lacking, relevant in the performance Enquadramento (2023), in the photograph Erva (2024), in the object Dois Turnos (2024), and in the video installation Moeda de Troca (2024). The critique of female repression is quite evident, whether through silencing, objectification, and other elements dear to the heavy structure of patriarchal society. All are poignant testimonies of this daily struggle led by women, yet a photograph points to promising unfoldings in these multifaceted aspects of the artist.
Cercamento (2023) was produced during the Afefé Residency, in Ibicoara, territory of the Chapada Diamantina in Bahia. In the work, there may be a premonition of the artist’s desire to work more strongly on the connections between the landscape and the feminine and, despite the basic record, the construction of the work seems to suggest geographical/ecological/urban issues. And there is the desire to speak of the social and symbolic condition of the strong figure, with a face wrapped in rope, also tied to something unknown off-screen. Earth, grass, and antennas, in an imminent progress that reveals something frightening and lurking, accommodate this enigmatic facet of Roditi’s work. “Bodies are differences. They are, therefore, forces”2, writes Jean-Luc Nancy, in a thought that can be extended to the unforgettable and overflowing production of Liane Roditi.
Mario Gioia, August 2024
- DUBOIS, Philippe. Cinema, Video, Godard. São Paulo, Cosac Naify, 2004, p. 73.
- NANCY, Jean-Luc. 58 Clues about the Body. Revista UFMG, Belo Horizonte, v. 19, n. 1 and 2, p. 47, Jan./Dec. 2012.
Lei Aldir Blanc. São Paulo, Brazil, 2021.