Stone Paper Scissors and Dust: Liliane Dardot e Marcelo Silveira

"Stone, Paper, Scissors and Dust," an exhibition by Liliane Dardot and Marcelo Silveira, brings together a collection of altered prints created by both artists from lithograph prints originally produced by Liliane, the Minas Gerais-born artist, in Olinda at the Guaianases Printmaking Workshop between 1979 and 1989, a period during which they began a long-lasting friendship in that collaborative space. Those works, which touched on diverse subjects ranging from the difficult political environment of the country to daily routines and landscapes, are now revisited by both, simultaneously reinventing and transforming them into new co-authored works, employing collages, color retouching, and other techniques.

The resulting works reflect not only their individual trajectories: the reinterpretation undertaken by both engages with the glazed overlays of Liliane's drawings and paintings, as well as with the accumulations and appropriations that characterize Marcelo's work. In this sense, one of the richest aspects of the series presented here is the fact that, while recording co-authorship, it preserves no less aspects of their respective individual works. That is, we see together the gestures of Liliane, of Marcelo, and of Marcelo and Liliane, as if the co-authorship were a third author – something more than a work by Liliane with Marcelo, but rather, let us repeat, this other unique figure that is Liliane-Marcelo. This peculiar authorship is reflected in the works themselves, either because they transform an image originally planned to be made in series (as is the nature of printmaking) into a unique work, or because this arises from a reinterpretation of stages originating from the lithographic technique itself, such as the superimposition of prints and watercolor effects, which create the curious situation in which the existence of different versions of the same matrix evokes and reinforces the ambiguity between original and copy that has always been inherent in graphic language.