Fabiana Preti works in the interstices. Born and based in São Paulo, she investigates, across multiple languages, precisely the in-between spaces among the artifices of artistic creation. Holding a degree in industrial design from Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado, she echoes methods of precision and formal rigor in her production through gestural control. She began her research in the visual arts through tilework, unfolding relationships among forms, colors, and combinations in patterns painted on ceramic. Prelúdio is this starting point: the patterns, initially repeated on industrial objects, have served as the driving force of her production for more than ten years, and an interest in materiality has become increasingly present.

With a refined eye for the choice of materials and an attentive listening to what they have to say, her geometric compositions began to be applied to fabrics of various meshes and weaves—such as velvet, leather, jute, and traditional linen. The support and its porosity thus become the main protagonists in her research. Preti seems to trace the paths of materials and listen to what tonalities express and, in this exercise of absolute presence, the repetitive gesture unfolds across the languages she practices in a state of meditative trance. Beyond a formal procedure, it is in fact a way of being in the world, of thinking about time, gesture, the body, and space.

In this sense, repetition becomes an operation of resignification and transformation. Translating an inner temporality, points, lines, planes, and forms reiterate the creative impulse of a rhythmic logic; the elements function like scores that mark the tempo of her compositions. Thus, as in musical notation, the alternation between mark and silence is fundamental to the final work. As mentioned by Wassily Kandinsky, color has no limit in the representation we make of it when we hear the word; it is only in the relationships among tonalities, forms, and surface that melody takes shape. Emptiness in her works also constitutes matter—it is an active dimension that articulates the dynamic between cosmos and chaos that emerges in her practice.

This in-between space provides a framework for reading her production. Whether in painting and the relationships among form, color, and void; in embroidery between mesh and thread; or in sculpture and the play of scale between body and space, the symbolism Preti carries always refers to vital dynamics between balance and imbalance—what Buddhist practices call the middle path. Between materiality and spirituality, these trajectories and dialogues offer more compelling possibilities of drive than any egoic imposition.

Text by Gabriel Babolim