In yesterday's post we analysed an artist making a comment through a textile-based installation at the Venice Biennale about Mexican traditions and Spanish colonialism. Let's look instead today at Teresa Lanceta, a Spanish artist who has explored the power of traditional textiles through a series of collaborative projects.
Born in Barcelona, Lanceta has been weaving since 1972; at the time quite a few artists living and practicing in a Catalonia afflicted by Francisco Franco's dictatorship, turned to a renewal of the textile arts.
Lanceta started then a long-term research project, a thesis that focused on a comparative analysis of repeating motifs in 20th century textiles among traditional artisans and avant-garde artists.
The artist refused in her thesis the distinction and the boundaries between decorative and fine arts. According to her, artisanal textiles are indeed to be conceived as an artistic genre that lived for a long time and that is constantly varied, changed and enriched on an aesthetic level.
Though Lanceta is known for her paintings, drawings, engravings and videos, her textile works constitute the core of her practice, especially her studies on Moroccan textiles.
At the 57th International Art Exhibition in Venice, Lanceta displays in the Pavilion of Traditions inside the Arsenale, a series of her pieces ("Adiós al rombo"; "Rosas Blancas I-II and III" and "Franjas II") introduced by an original Moroccan carpet representing the starting point for her entire corpus of textile studies.
The artist often tries to reproduce in her weaving the patterns and designs of textiles and rugs found in bazaars. By reproducing the motifs, Lanceta accesses to a type of art governed by a set of rules that she tries to bend, reinterpret and adapt.
Diamond shapes, a recurring motif in the textile art of the nomads of the Middle Atlas region, were first replicated by Lanceta in her early works, but, in more recent pieces like the ones exhibited in Venice, she introduced more variation, adding blank spaces, distorting the diamond motifs, juxtaposing horizontal and vertical diamond-shaped figures or mutating them and turning the rhomboid figures into strips, introducing in this way an element of unpredictability, and adding her own textile language in an established idiom of fabrics.
Her studies of weaves, geometric designs and folk art could be analysed not just from a graphic point of view, but also as an investigation about communities of women weavers: Lanceta lived and worked with gypsies in Barcelona and with Moroccan women, all of them anonymous yet unique women sharing a tradition that could be interpreted as a source code.
While the artworks on the walls look intriguing, especially when you consider each piece as the natural progression of the previous one and therefore as a way to follow the development of Lanceta's vision, it is a bit of a shame that (probably for reasons of space), the section dedicated to Lanceta's works doesn't include also texts and videos compiled from her interviews with the women she worked with, as they would have added another layer to the artist's display.