Spinning Colours, Weaving Meaning

It is not fortuitous that the web is the image that best defines the progress of sculptor Nani Cárdenas’ visual vocabulary: the web as strategy and road map, but also as metaphor. From the initial investigations in the interstices of meaning in wood carvings to the delicate and complex spatial drawings in “Chromotherapy”, this is an oeuvre with an increasing density of symbolism that has conquered domains of experience and representation. These domains interweave, intersect and communicate, and it is in this movement that they find their relevance.

There is, however, an eloquent breaking point in this expansive growth: a medium format piece called “Arachne” (2003). Starting with the choice of material, this piece elaborates on the myth of the spinner that challenges the gods and is transformed into a spider. It represents the character as a mutant figure, with the human half growing from the waist in a graceful sweep of wood and the animal half flowing in a series of long metal extremities. These fingers, designed for spinning, are in themselves yarn, the promise of a textile.

Besides linking two clearly defined stages in the artist’s work –wood carvings and metal weavings–, “Arachne” is in itself a poetics. It reveals the meaning that Cárdenas’ work has given to the act of weaving: it is a celebration and documentation of bonds, but at the same time an act of survival. The spider weaves in order to catch her food and define the boundaries of her territory. Her web is also her saliva, the metonymic image of her discourse. Within the tightly-packed symbolism of this universe the discourse becomes nourishment; representation feeds on the act of communication.

If we reflect on the myth of Arachne, and bear in mind that the event that unleashes the tragedy is a deliberate act of misinformation –a particular interference in communication– we are able to grasp the meaning behind the recent choice of materials. In “Chromotherapy”, telecommunication wires are recycled not only for their ductility, lightness and colour, but also because they reverberate with double meaning: they represent at the same time the expectation of a virtual rendezvous and its trace. Thus, in its vital explosion, in its appearance of veil dancing and healing spells, “Chromotherapy” is, above all, a celebration of dialogue.

Within the coordinates proposed by Cárdenas’ work, weaving has ceased to be functional, generic and anchored in the cliché of the feminine to become a representation of drawing in space: pure colours, free strokes, knots and denouements. Each of the pieces in “Cromotherapy” acts rhythmically, gaining volume and then narrowing down until it becomes a surface, and offering itself as an outline of a human, animal or plant figure before returning to being a flowing line, the purity of form. Thus, “Chromotherapy” is also a sketchbook; a book whose material is the semantic recycling of the verb ‘to weave’.

Text by Diego Otero

Translated by:Alessandra Pinasco