The exhibition “Fibers are my paint. The loom, my brush” is a comprehensive retrospective that celebrates four decades of production by the artist Marina Lafer. Resulting from the collaboration between ETEL and the Almeida & Dale Art Gallery at the iconic Casa Zalszupin, the show presents a range of techniques, from watercolor, collage, and tapestry to weaving, her main medium of expression.
In this fascinating repertoire of experiences with weaves, textures, tones, and compositions, we can see a trajectory of significant discoveries and continuities. Marina Lafer is part of a tradition that challenges the boundaries between functionality and artistic expression, capable of transcending, with ease, the rigid and artificial divides between the artisanal and the sophisticated, the utilitarian and the artistic: moments of synthesis that reverberate a visionary horizon, characteristic of Brazilian modernity. In this sense, the presentation of this work at Casa Zalszupin, along with the selected benches from ETEL's collection, becomes even more timely.
In various ways, Lafer's work tells us that everything that can be inhabited is a concrete analogue of existence and corresponds to an expanded dimension of being. Combined with the architectural arrangement of Casa Zalszupin, with its contrasting, dynamic spatiality, and its meticulous use of materials and light, architecture and art here reinforce each other in their dialogues and transitions: exchanges between interiority and exteriority, movements of opening and closing, dilation and condensation.
If the watercolors and collages from the late 1970s bring us to a scene of origin and the energy encapsulated there, the fabric studies, in turn, are the everyday locus of her experimentation, in a continuous and expansive flow. In the Mini-Textiles, we perceive this inexhaustible variability, from the meticulous combinations of the properties of the fibers and the surprising compositions among the weaves. Similarly, each bench on display invites the enjoyment of its own uniqueness, language, and proposal; however, when appreciated together, in the continuity of the environment, they are also able to reveal a strong unity and cohesion of principles.
The exhibition also features a large wall panel created by the artist in the 1990s and a video installation that delves into the procedural backstage of her art. In “Fibers are my paint. The loom, my brush”, the correspondences between the languages of the loom, the House, and the furniture manifest themselves to the same extent as the enjoyment of space, in surprising proofs of adequacy and beauty engendered in complementary scales.