Espacio Liminal

“Liminal Space”, the title defining this exhibition by Lianet Martínez, is not a concept chosen at random: it sincerely reflects the state and creative moment of an artist who continues to cross thresholds—the colloquial equivalent of the Latin root limen. In this way, the artist invites us to enter a space of transition that refers to her own creative process and intertwines directly with the works that make up the exhibition.

Lianet’s work is diverse in its expressive resources—painting, sculpture, and installations—and privileges the materiality of the pieces, the gesture as a trace of real time, and the energy invested in the work. In some canvases, the use of fire creates living textures, the result of an incineration process that becomes a powerful expressive device.

A sculptural sense dominates Lianet’s artistic practice; she often uses her own body as a model, as in the series Cartography of a Body, which reflects the decomposition of her own physical form, suggesting meanings for each part of her body through gestures captured in molds of herself. It is worth noting that this use of the “self” as a universal entity and expressive body recurs in artists as diverse as Frida Kahlo, Ana Mendieta, Tania Bruguera, Cindy Sherman and Shirin Neshat. In Lianet, one perceives a tactile intention that could be summed up in the gesture of an embrace. In this sense, there is a significant space in her work that addresses existential issues related to emotion and affection, protection and rupture. This is where the notion of the “liminal” becomes explicit: the threshold between one state of existence and another, the transition toward a new creative phase, toward another experience.

The Coraza series, which uses the shape of the Cuban shield as a hanger mold, embraces concepts, suggests defense, and at the same time becomes a space filled with evocative images of emotions and feelings. In a world that relativizes reality and defines itself as one of post-truth, Lianet’s work situates us within the territory of sensibility—the ultimate refuge of art, the space of the real: perhaps that which cannot be replaced as human experience in times when emotions are instrumentalized.

Lianet is an artist to watch closely; in her converge rare virtues: the vocation of an artist, mastery of the techné of art, the creation of knowledge and symbolic values, combined with determination and practical sense to lead her work where she intends—and finally, the continuous exercise of sensitivity.