The Power of Change in Akira Liones' Artwork

 

 

by Allende Renck

Curator

E-mail: allende.renck@gmail.com
@a.renck

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     Akira Liones is an Artist that knows how to work the sensible – here understood as what Jacques Ranciére once proposed as an element of aesthetical link between different temporal lines. Her work elaborates different times and engenders language mobilization through an understanding of the social power of affection, which is a way of saying that Liones' artistic manner relates intimately with what Walter Benjamin called dialectical image, that is: an image that emerges suddenly, in a flash, and suspends time, giving the world an instant to elaborate a thought through an understanding of the past that lies within the present.

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      Akira’s work does not tend to completeness because it works with a process of completing, which signifies that she imerses herself in a never-ending process of “lackness” and “fillingness” that is unfolded through psychological time ad infinitum. It is exactly that process that turns Liones' artistic propositions into one of the most interesting bodies of work of contemporary art. Her potentiality is based on an understanding of the complexity of human minds and bodies and a willingness to not only accept but to offer that complexity without trying to solve it.

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    One of her recent paintings can, in my opinion, summarize the variety of themes that enriches her artistic singularity since it is full of allegorical potential. The canvas promptly places in front of us a sitting body. In his right hand one can see a cigarette, while his left hand holds another hand from an arm that lives without a body - as if asking for a possibility of embodiment. Behind the seated body, a yin-yang is drawn in an opened and sliced ​​way, making it look like a moebius ribbon and making it impossible to affirm the inside and the outside – creating a coexistence. Above / below the lines of the yin-yang-moebius we read the following words: “No Fear” – “Efeitos” [Effects] – “Do Afeto” [Of Affect] – Freedom. In the dress that wears the body a piece of Nina Simone's Feeling Good lyrics is transcribed.

     Feeling Good lyrics (and the not at all subtle quote of the name of the singer in the corner of the canvas) establishes a semantic field – a semantic field both inside and outside – that makes it possible to rescue a relational suggestion among the aforementioned signifiers. The documentary "What Happened Miss Simone?” begins with an old interview of the American singer where the interviewer asks to her “What is freedom?”, Simone thinks for a moment and answers after some preamble: “freedom is to have no fear”.

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 The powerful, yet young, work of Akira Liones is a work that has no fear of diving deeply into the most traumatic of the Real – here understood in the Lacanian sense of what cannot be Represented, but which, in the Poetic Act, can be Presented – and to elaborate, along the tensioned line of Time, the Effects of our Affections. Such a work has the power to change the world and to keep up with the proposed metamorphoses.