Liliana Moro

Galleria Emi Fontana, Milan
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A blank space between two quotation marks serves as the title of Liliana Moro’s new installation. It is a declaration of intent, an idea of opening, not an “untitled” but a “non-title.” The gallery’s floor has been sprinkled with glass and the viewers crush it as they walk, making an almost annoying sound. The piece may be connected to some of her recent works of horizontal orientation, like the carpets that covered the floors of other exhibition spaces. In the case of the carpets, however, one’s footstep met a plush surface; the sensation was one of softness, the effect silent.

Where the soft floors invited pause, however, it would be difficult, even injurious, to sit on the bits of glass, which created different visual and acoustic associations for every visitor. Sound reveals itself as one of the most important elements in Moro’s artistic language. Through a hole in the wall—an opening that connects with another space, also covered with glass—one could listen to the echo of footsteps and see a child’s bed made of crystal, a material both strong and enormously fragile.

It is a kind of reproposal of the empty bed Torno Subito, originally presented by Moro in 1989 at her exhibition space in Via Lazzaro Palazzi. It was there, in the artist’s debut show, that her distinctive topic of childhood first emerged, even if it was only stated through absence.

Like the sword in the stone, the bed—like the tiny, unusable chair in La Fidanzata di Zorro (1999), similarly made of crystal and as persistent as childhood memories—is a metaphor for an impossible condition and the fragility of existence. But it is also the sign of particular point of view. In 1992, Liliana Moro showed Abbassamento (Lowering), “an army of small, paper dolls that faced a tiny fortified city,” as described by the artist herself, for whom “the title encouraged the spectators to modify their point of view, setting their gaze at floor level.” This “lowering” can still be considered a valid metaphoric key to the artist’s work.




Laura Cherubini
Translation by Amanda Coulson