Written by Line Ulekleiv, art critic and freelance writer
Aurora Passero’s latest works in woven and dyed nylon can be seen as monumental installations, in the space between sculpture and painting. Using such techniques as weaving and dyeing as her point of departure, Passero manipulates materials in synthetic and natural fibres with processes from painting. Drawing freely on ethnological material and complex popular culture, art craft tradition and art history, Passero achieves a distinctive tactile visuality that is often extended to include the room. As a result of this, the works become both expansive and reserved. ‘I wanted to work in a way that would subvert a priori intentions. I wanted to find a way to generate unpredictable, indeterminate consequences,’ Robert Morris has said about his wall works in felt, which he started to produce in the late 1960s. Passero moves in tandem with this intention.
Architecture is indispensable as a fixed point. It is strongly present as an element that provides a firm structure and establishes sight lines. The resistance and balance between material, form, room and content are focal points for Passero. The entire room becomes a work with separate, quivering parts that nevertheless function in relation to each other. The light from the room is filtered into braids and cords; they have a sculptural grammar in that they include the floor, and with the aid of gravity combine massivity with delicate ramifications. The distance between the elements – the interspaces – are an entity in themselves. The hanging cords become like energetic, twisting flexes between floor and ceiling – with their own withdrawn, airy logic. With a distinctive gleaming frailty the materials take the light, on the surfaces and in the fringed outer edges.
In a sense, the nylon material contradicts the organic depth and the contour of the forms. It is purely synthetic, industrially produced and applied – a smooth, durable and sterile material that via Passero’s hands absorbs colour and assumes artistic qualities. Passero’s dyeing process gives rise to unpredictable results, and the colouristic scale is pivotal to her approach to the potential of the weave. She works with the idiom of painting – particularly the non-figurative painting of modernism. Cy Twombly’s gestural light touch and hatched line is perhaps one of several possible echoes here. Tears in the loosely woven and coarse structure can be perceived as wear (and tear). A risk and nerve arise out of a controlled randomness, and this tactic gains significance in the precise room.
The lightness and poetic sphere of Passero’s works negotiate in most cases with their monumental expression. She weaves regular simple structures where the expression is occasionally open and uneven, with a formlessness that cannot simply be conceptualised. The weave is nuanced, implying transitional phases and transience. Sometimes it is transparent, at other times even and reassuring. The tactile inconstancy of the surface and the graded colour scale comment on the observer’s movements and position in the room. One drifts around as usual until one stops up, temporarily caught by a mesh of threads.
The raw and sturdy meet the sensual and frail in Passero’s works, which generally work with contrasts and abstraction. She points at the intersection point between contrasting qualities, such as heavy/light, open/closed and organic/synthetic. The contrasts thereby become a built-in ideal that creates height for finely attuned degrees between two extremities, in a magnetic field between order and disintegration. The title Ivory Tactics thereby opens up for spaces that are an extension of the purely textile. Like the works, this juxtaposition of words commuicates with the observer, but at the same time appears to be an enigma, the implying of a ritual or an intrigue. A sober objectivity, a deliberate tactic or an agreed-on routine, is linked to a rare and politicised material. Something exceptional, wild and valuable is subjected to a strict regime.
Written by Line Ulekleiv, art critic and freelance writer
Aurora Passero’s latest works in woven and dyed nylon can be seen as monumental installations, in the space between sculpture and painting. Using such techniques as weaving and dyeing as her point of departure, Passero manipulates materials in synthetic and natural fibres with processes from painting. Drawing freely on ethnological material and complex popular culture, art craft tradition and art history, Passero achieves a distinctive tactile visuality that is often extended to include the room. As a result of this, the works become both expansive and reserved. ‘I wanted to work in a way that would subvert a priori intentions. I wanted to find a way to generate unpredictable, indeterminate consequences,’ Robert Morris has said about his wall works in felt, which he started to produce in the late 1960s. Passero moves in tandem with this intention.
Architecture is indispensable as a fixed point. It is strongly present as an element that provides a firm structure and establishes sight lines. The resistance and balance between material, form, room and content are focal points for Passero. The entire room becomes a work with separate, quivering parts that nevertheless function in relation to each other. The light from the room is filtered into braids and cords; they have a sculptural grammar in that they include the floor, and with the aid of gravity combine massivity with delicate ramifications. The distance between the elements – the interspaces – are an entity in themselves. The hanging cords become like energetic, twisting flexes between floor and ceiling – with their own withdrawn, airy logic. With a distinctive gleaming frailty the materials take the light, on the surfaces and in the fringed outer edges.
In a sense, the nylon material contradicts the organic depth and the contour of the forms. It is purely synthetic, industrially produced and applied – a smooth, durable and sterile material that via Passero’s hands absorbs colour and assumes artistic qualities. Passero’s dyeing process gives rise to unpredictable results, and the colouristic scale is pivotal to her approach to the potential of the weave. She works with the idiom of painting – particularly the non-figurative painting of modernism. Cy Twombly’s gestural light touch and hatched line is perhaps one of several possible echoes here. Tears in the loosely woven and coarse structure can be perceived as wear (and tear). A risk and nerve arise out of a controlled randomness, and this tactic gains significance in the precise room.
The lightness and poetic sphere of Passero’s works negotiate in most cases with their monumental expression. She weaves regular simple structures where the expression is occasionally open and uneven, with a formlessness that cannot simply be conceptualised. The weave is nuanced, implying transitional phases and transience. Sometimes it is transparent, at other times even and reassuring. The tactile inconstancy of the surface and the graded colour scale comment on the observer’s movements and position in the room. One drifts around as usual until one stops up, temporarily caught by a mesh of threads.
The raw and sturdy meet the sensual and frail in Passero’s works, which generally work with contrasts and abstraction. She points at the intersection point between contrasting qualities, such as heavy/light, open/closed and organic/synthetic. The contrasts thereby become a built-in ideal that creates height for finely attuned degrees between two extremities, in a magnetic field between order and disintegration. The title Ivory Tactics thereby opens up for spaces that are an extension of the purely textile. Like the works, this juxtaposition of words commuicates with the observer, but at the same time appears to be an enigma, the implying of a ritual or an intrigue. A sober objectivity, a deliberate tactic or an agreed-on routine, is linked to a rare and politicised material. Something exceptional, wild and valuable is subjected to a strict regime.