Barbara Petzold Horna
Lima, may 2012
“Las artesanías pertenecen a un mundo anterior a la separación entre lo útil y lo hermoso” (Octavio Paz).
In the middle of information chaos, senseless innovation and visual pollution; Conceptual Craftsmanship raises up to give the cultural labor of textile a new meaning. The artist proposes a hand related matter contrasting with an industrial standardized global environment. The pieces focus in the construction of an individual identity, stamped with the collective process of a society that hardly and shyly checks its common characteristics.
The pieces question the imperative capitalist of production and the division between intellectual and physical work. Suggesting a concept of postindustrial handcrafted activity in the frame of art markets. Self-denomination artisan liberates and allows her ideas to develop without preconceptions. Alexia identifies the role of the artist as a material and conceptual craftsman. She revalues the direct relationship with the material and the intimate link with it during the process of work.
The elements materialize the process of introspection: embroidery represents the gear of time and space, every stitch implicates an in and out of conscious contents which end up externalized in archetypical figures. This show evokes a dialog between art and handcraft ship, ideas that have been contextualized historically and socially as different and opposite. The artist pursue is to trace the birth of both concepts and uncover its common thread, thus questioning values and wonders in our esthetic perception.
