Curated by Stella Bottai

To tell the story of Liliana Moro’s first exhibition with Rodeo, I must begin with a digression. In 1992, Moro – at the time an early-career artist in her early 30s – was invited to participate in Documenta IX, curated by Jan Hoet. The artist proposed an ambitious intervention (very much loved by Hoet) that eventually could not be realised due to structural issues. However, the idea alone conveys a clear image of Moro’s distinctive relationship with the governing forces of time, space and art history. A steel cable was to be anchored to Kassel’s Neue Galerie, traversing the length of the building all the way to the outside, where it would attach to a tiny, amaranth-red Fiat 126 – the artist’s own car that she would have driven to Kassel from her home in Milan for the occasion. Its engine (re-designed to run on electricity) would be on, performing the physical attempt to symbolically tow the Neue Galerie forward. Moro wasn’t, and isn’t, attracted to the feeling of belonging but rather she is attentive to the question of how thresholds are built, crossed, and challenged. Instead of placing herself within the comforting security of the museum walls alongside the more established artists – including Luciano Fabro, seminal figure in the Arte Povera movement under whom Moro studied at the Fine Art Academy of Brera in the 1980s – she wished to be outside and prioritise a risk-taking desire to shift the institution away from its foundations, all by herself. This artwork is not about succeeding or failing to realise such intention: its vibrancy lies in the choice to give history continuity through disruption, and understand art and artists as agents of tectonic activity, no matter how large the challenge and how small the tools. In a sort of David-Goliath scenario, Moro’s Fiat 126 stands for her free, self-ironic and individualistic mindset attempting to shake up the weighty legacy of artistic currents dominating the discourse up to that point.

The image of a roaring tiny car trying to get a whole building to move sets the conceptual premise of the underdog, an important subject in the artist’s wider practice that underpins Moro’s new exhibition In No Time. The human figure rarely features in Moro’s work in explicit ways, as the artist likes to turn to figurative metaphors, very often devices and animals, to comment upon her time and hold up a mirror to society. In a tradition ancient at least as Aesop’s Fables through to contemporary artists, zoological characters are called upon as storytellers and treasurers of moral wisdom and contemporary critique in disguise. Moro’s first Underdog is a sculptural group made of a pack of five male Dogo Argentinos at natural scale, firstly exhibited at Galleria Emi Fontana in 2005. Their bodies are captured in the act of aggressively attacking each other to death, metaphorically staging the dynamic of a group of alpha males engaged in a physical fight for power. As equal body size and uniform chromatic tones unite them, our underdog stands out by way of its behaviour and position in the space: one of the Dogos keeps at distance from the rest, contemplating – perhaps judging – rather than partaking in the fight. Does the choice of keeping as an outsider make him the loser or winner (and in relation to what)? Moro’s work highlights the arbitrary nature of social perceptions as constructs that require a set of conditions to define identities and hierarchies within groups. “Who is in is in, who is out is out” (Chi é dentro é dentro, chi é fuori é fuori) reads the title of one of her past works, named after a common Italian idiom, as her titles frequently do. Megaphones replace the heads of people in the small black and white collages of that series, symbolically pointing to the power (and accountability) of words in shaping collectivity, relationships and spaces.

At Rodeo, a flock of sheep are traced in pencil, faithful to natural scale, over white paper collaged on equally-sized white boards. The reduced palette of these works, titled XXX, 2024, is as succinct as the overall atmosphere of the room. Minimal on the surface, maximalist at the core, Moro is known for her ability to include only what is strictly necessary. One may call it rigour, or concentration. The sheep turn their heads and engage the viewer, who can picture a direct stare even though the eyes are missing. These are no mythical, breathing beings in the way Jannis Kounellis deployed living horses in Untitled (12 Horses), 1969. Moro’s sheep exist in direct semantic relationship with reality through their declared fictional presence – with a nod to the artist’s early days in theatre and her continued interest in its vocabulary of mimesis. Alike a chorus of nobodies, the ovine crowd stands alongside one exception – a black neon sheep. Here is Moro’s underdog of twenty years later: the exceptional character which, in the artist’s cosmos, speaks not only of personal choices and breaking the rules, but also of the paradoxes and ambiguities attached to this popular set phrase. Making an aside – the etymology of “pecuniary” comes from the Latin pecunia, which means “money” and is in turn rooted in the word for herd and cattle, which at the time were sources of wealth. In its social history, the sheep is deeply entangled with the most universal systems of value and belief, that is money.

Beliefs form groups. It is impossible to know for sure who, or what, Moro’s black sheep may be, which gathering she may or may not belong to – by choice or unwillingly. The paradox gauged by the artist is that of a moment in time where it has become more complex than ever to talk about majorities and outsiders; forces of oppression that seemed limited to the fringes of political life gain increased momentum in Western nations, whilst democracies are in crisis-mode. “Who is in is in, who is out is out” – of what?

The only dimension with no outsiders is the flow of time. And, sadly, pollution. Moro is deeply connected to the existential depth of the human experience, and as such is interested in nature as a witness of loss and transience. A soft, floor-based work in traffic yellow intimately envelops the sound of an intermittent water drop. Its tempo is irregular and not hectic, it could be the aftermath of, or an announcement for, imminent flooding. Titled like the exhibition, In No Time, this small work evokes the presence of water without dictating its terms, creating an image of either scarcity or excess. For those familiar with Moro’s past works, In No Time conjures the miniature version of Avvinghiatissimi, 1992, presented in the Italian Pavilion in Venice in 2019, and more recently as part of the artist’s major exhibition at Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz, in 2023: yellow foam mattresses tightly tied with thick red straps to the frame of a bed were propped against a wall, with two speakers bound to the sides playing a heart-rending tango by Astor Piazzolla. Sound is, indeed, a crucial medium for Moro who, between the late 80’s and today, has produced some forty-five acoustic pieces. Even when not literally performed, a sonic dimension is often implied in her pieces through the use of materials and visual constructions that either hinge upon the absence of noise – such as the insulating foam walls of Paradiso Artficiale, 1990 – or that rely on the viewer imagination to activate it, as seen in Salti, 1997 – a set of three closed-circuit slot car tracks accompanied by symmetrical drawings that speak of the infinite circulation of a car engine racing past.

Salti and In No Time both contemplate repetition – physical, visual, and even emotional – as a mechanism of growth or reduction, understood ultimately as transformation. Moro’s incessant drops of water paint the sonic landscape of a wait reminiscent of the philosophical concept of “enduring time” formulated by Lisa Baraitser: a time which, in the face of today’s challenges across climate change, unending violent conflict and widening social inequalities, is no longer flowing but has become “stuck, intensely felt, yet radically suspended”.

Text by Stella Bottai