Camila Belchior on Jacques Douchez and Norberto Nicola

Texture, quantity, and depth have been elementary traits of the twenty-six tapestries, hung from the ceiling and surrounded by mirrorclad partitions, in “Os pássaros de fogo levantarão voo novamente. As formas tecidas de Jacques Douchez e Norberto Nicola” (The Firebirds Will Take Flight Once more: The Woven Types of Jacques Douchez and Norberto Nicola). Curated by assume vivid astro focus—a collective whose variable personnel on this case consisted solely of its founder, Eli Sudbrack—the present offered the work of two artists who have been enterprise companions within the weaving studio Atelier Douchez-Nicola, established in 1959 in São Paulo. Regardless of operating the studio collectively, the artists at all times stored their inventive autonomy, and their work has not been proven aspect by aspect as the main focus of an exhibition because the dissolution of their enterprise in 1980. Each continued to work on tapestries individually and to exhibit in group and solo exhibits to the tip of their lives. This exhibition, which was not organized chronologically or as a full retrospective, interspersed 13 of every artist’s three-dimensional works all through the room. Labels have been laid on the bottom in a circle underneath every bit, highlighting the world every occupied in area and welcoming guests to stroll throughout every work somewhat than viewing it from one place. The pink-painted ceiling above was, based on Sudbrack, a refined approach of acknowledging the artists’ homosexuality.

Douchez, who was born in Mâcon, France, in 1921, and Nicola, a local Paulistano born in 1930, met by Samson Flexor’s Atelier Abstração, a corporation that helped unfold geometric abstraction in Brazil within the Fifties. Their manifesto “Formas Tecidas” (Woven Shapes), written in 1969, claims their goal in tapestry as that of making “a woven object” free from “the standard concept of flat illustration”; the textual content ends with the declaration “The woven work should mannequin area in a multidimensional type.” Certain to the systematic grid used for creating designs that have been to be handwoven on looms (by each the artists themselves and employed professionals), Douchez and Nicola labored independently to create fiber artworks that explored the tensions between dichotomies akin to empty and full, taut and free, clean and hirsute, flat and voluminous. In Isfahan, ca. 1970, Douchez makes use of an general patterned weave in cool blended earthy tones and wrapped warp threads to create a play between predominantly rounded and rectangular shapes. On one aspect, the work is a colourful three-layered floor that explores constructive and adverse areas, and on the opposite it’s a flat single aircraft in beige, with a big brown circle within the center. An untitled tapestry by Nicola in primarily heat orange tones, additionally from 1970, has sections of the weft wrapped into three central woven columns. Flanking these columns, 13 particular person woven strips on both sides—in heat blended palettes of oranges, yellows, and pinks— overhang the in any other case tense tapestry aircraft, bringing a way of weight to the underside part of the weave not seen from the reverse. The consequence displays Nicola’s curiosity within the three-dimensional potential of loosening strands, which he continued to analyze through the years and that was right here evident in a lot of his tapestries on show.

Whereas Nicola largely explored three-dimensionality in ways in which delivered to thoughts hanging roots and vines, Douchez’s works used systematic fissures and tight overlaid strands to launch tapestries from the two-dimensional aircraft. “The Firebirds Will Take Flight Once more” served as a way of reigniting curiosity in these artists’ alluring works and of highlighting their particular person approaches to the artwork of tapestry. Extra broadly, the present threw down the gauntlet for the significance of materiality and medium at the same time as a lot up to date artwork exercise appears to be migrating into the digital realm.

— Camila Belchior