Casear

Casear more deeply incorporates research into fibers and weaves within Fabiana Preti’s artistic production. The artist makes incisions in supports, in materials such as velvet, leather, and felt, opening embroidered buttonholes. Variations in color, texture, and fiber directly refer to readings that integrate craft practices—especially textile ones—with suggestions of skin, body, and gender. Mechthild Fend, professor of art history at Goethe University Frankfurt, questions the use of skin as a surface of image and language, and how this implies taking into account the materiality of surfaces.

In the works of the series, the incisions function ambiguously as both wound and repair. At times aligned in a grid, at others separated into groupings, the markings on the support create a kind of cartography of experiences shaped by gendered experience. Marks, signs, scars, and foreign bodies—indicated by the insertion of buttons—translate the intimate and social relations of bodies that sustain experiences through a sedimentary process, reflecting on vulnerability and resilience in contexts of trauma.

Gabriel Babolim