By Cary Cordova, 2004

Calling Liliana Wilson a serious person, she would admit, is putting it lightly.  She says, “I try to think of myself as a soul – I mean, I forget all the time – but I want to think of myself as a spirit walking on the earth, and that way I can remember that I’m going to die.”  Her efforts to remind herself of her mortality center in her desire to live a meaningful existence.  Her objective is to maximize her time here on earth.  Not only does she see herself as a spirit on the earth, but she recognizes and paints that quality in others.  Her subjects are human, but they emit the ethereal quality of spirits, with their fates caught in the balance of the paintings.

Though always an artist, Liliana Wilson did not formally study art until later in life.  Growing up in Valparaíso, Chile in the 1950s and ‘60s, her family neither considered, nor could they afford, sending her to art classes.  Still, she learned the magic of drawing early in life and cultivated her role as the artist of the family.  Her skill set her apart and provided a means of defining herself in the world.

But growing up in unstable economic circumstances at home – and in Chile as a whole – led her to pursue a more reliable career.  In the early 1970s, she studied law at the University of Valparaíso, where she was able to cultivate her deeply imbedded sense of justice.  Her studies coincided with the dramatic political changes in Chile that followed the 1970 election of Salvador Allende.  His efforts to nationalize and redistribute wealth spurred passionate responses, both for and against.  Wilson steered clear of much of the debates, in part because she felt alienated by the vehemence of each side, but also because, as a woman, she felt disregarded by the male-dominated political factions.  

Complete disengagement from the political situation was impossible.  The military coup of 1973 initiated a wave of well-documented and horrifying human rights violations, with at least three thousand people losing their lives.  Wilson found herself in a ludicrous position, now an enforcer of laws that no longer mattered.  

Encouraged by a friend, Wilson decided to visit the United States in 1977.   Initially uncertain of how long she would stay, she gradually created a new life for herself in Texas.  Her law degree no longer as applicable in the United States, she found various odd jobs to support herself.  In some ways, her new instability was an opportunity.  She returned to art, enrolling in classes in the early eighties and investing all her spare time and energy into her painting.

Most of her early work sought to process the trauma she had witnessed in Chile.  One painting documents seeing two human bodies washed on to a local Chilean beach.  Informally, people presumed the bodies were among many dropped from a military airplane that had magically evaded submersion.  Her painting is not an exact rendition of the scene, but an attempt to give the bodies their dignity and memorialize their fate.

Increasingly, her paintings began to grapple with feeling an outsider in the United States.  The consciousness of her immigrant status, finding herself neither Chilean, nor American, but in the indefinable borderlands – what Gloria Anzaldúa called “Nepantla” – triggered a series of paintings that show people caught between worlds.  Their circumstances appear surreal, immobile, and laden with tragedy: a young boy wrapped in barbed wire; three people like birds in a cage; or a woman marrying a man with a bird’s head.  The portraits render moments of pending doom, both physical and psychological.  

The works also represent a moment when human action might change the fate of her subjects.  The boy might be able to break the wire; the person who rises to the top of the birdcage might benefit from new perspective; and the bride might see her mistake and rebel.  The paintings invite the viewer to take action, to help her subjects, or rather, recognize that the human conditions she portrays are real-life situations that we can change, for ourselves and for others.

Wilson traditionally has used beauty to lure the viewer into her paintings, but then undercut the scene with a disturbing floating eye, hollow torso, or red fish.  The unusual details hint at narratives only decipherable in the imagination. Some of her most recent paintings continue in this vein. “El Ridiculo,” / “The Fool” shows a young boy gazing at the moon, but wrapped in rope and wearing a pointed dunce cap; “El Prisionero” / “The Prisoner” is a close-up of a young boy’s face wrapped in a floating cage; and “La Caída del Angel,” / “The Fall of The Angel” shows a winged boy grieving on the ground with a bleeding wing.  Her subjects are often young, alone, and in trouble.

However, alongside the narratives of distress, Wilson’s work is showing signs of a shift, or perhaps a broadening impulse to include life’s more joyful possibilities.  The sumptuousness of this new work, the luminescent reds and blues, the baroque gilding at the corners, and the burgeoning flowers not only indicate an easing off from the sorrow, but a craving for the sublime.  

These new works give the nude female figure center stage.  In “El Cisne,” or “The Swan,” a nude woman sits placidly at a window, watching a swan swimming in the moonlight.  But she has turned to look at the viewer, and in that exchange, the scene bears an intense intimacy.  In fact, though the image calls to mind the myth of Leda and the Swan, when Zeus disguised himself as the graceful bird to have his way with the young girl, the object of Leda’s attraction in Wilson’s work appears to be off the canvas.  In this way, the painting prioritizes Leda’s perspective and hints at other interpretations of the myth.

In “La Bella Durmiente,” or “Sleeping Beauty,” she creates a setting for the perfect slumber.  A beautiful woman rests unclothed on a luxurious red couch.  Above, a row of fantastically large flowers rise from the window onto the night sky.  Naturally, the title of the work calls to mind the classic fairy tale, but the height of pleasure in Wilson’s painting is in the sleep, not the awakening.  These paintings celebrate Wilson’s visions of a serene, sensuous life.  While so many of her paintings have grappled with life’s frailty and human vulnerability, her new work attempts to make room for a more tranquil and hopeful existence.

Such affirming paintings are a challenge for Wilson, who is more naturally inclined to portray struggle, but she sees this new direction as necessary to counter a world fraught with conflicts.  The work reflects her efforts to apply her evolving spiritual sensibility to her painting.  The pleasure she seeks to portray is based on peace, not consumption. The lack of material objects in her work is intentional. The absence of clothing is a necessary step toward paradise.  In “Entrada al Cielo,” or “Gateway to Heaven,” heaven’s gatekeeper bears nothing but a calla lily as her staff.  In the traditional place of St. Peter, Wilson proposes a new woman-centered iconography.

In her transition to the nude figure, an interesting juxtaposition has emerged.  Her unclothed characters appear the least vulnerable.  For instance, the woman and serpent image is not new to Wilson’s work.  She did a similar painting of a dressed woman holding a snake a few years ago.  But while that snake looked ready to overpower its keeper, Wilson’s new rendition of “Woman and Serpent” has changed the balance of power.  The snake is smaller, the environs more mystical, and the woman disrobed and free of social convention.  She looks out at the viewer with complete confidence.  She is the new “Eve” of the garden, empowered and impenetrable.

The reinterpretation of Catholic imagery is pervasive in Wilson’s work, both consciously and subconsciously.  She admits many of her subjects have a saint-like quality to them.  She readily incorporates angels and devils into her scenes.  As someone who attended mass almost every day as a child, the Church has made a profound impact on her.  However, as an informal convert to Buddhism, she is not so much intending to illustrate Western religious icons, as to reimagine their possibilities and challenge their historical meanings.  Often, the work is quietly subversive.  In “La Reina,” or “The Queen,” she illuminates the crown that she sees floating above all women of color, though only visible to those who are willing to see.

The allure of Liliana Wilson’s paintings is in their intimacy and capacity to cultivate alternate universes.  Most of Wilson’s images tell stories, but the outcome is up to the viewer.  In the past, the paintings have been an invitation to the viewer to see her own entrapment, or to empathize with the caging of others.  That still exists, but a new dimension has emerged that reflects her spiritual maturation.  In her quest for peace, she seeks to visualize her hopes for us all.