SÃO PAULO.- The Spanish artist Raul Díaz Reyes invited Brazilian artist Ana Mazzei to collaborate with him on a project at TextielLab, the textile laboratory of Textiel Museum in the Netherlands. The work they are now showing in Brazil was made in TextielLab with the support of a Contemporary Art Promotion award Reyes received from the Spanish Ministry of Culture.

Housed in one of the world’s most important textile museums, TextielLab is an arts laboratory that gives artists access to both industrial and manual manufacturing techniques. Reyes’ invitation to Mazzei was born from a desire to bring their artistic practices closer, in what was a new challenge for both artists – to work intensively in textiles for the first time, where they both started from the same lack of knowledge of the medium.

The process was virtual, with the artists communicating remotely with each other, producing images which were sent to TextielLab to be digitized and woven on an automated loom. While Mazzei explores the transposition of a set of her watercolors into textiles, Reyes works from collages prepared by applying graphical editing techniques to digital paintings.

The distinct poetic compositions of each artist come together in their shared interest in geometry and desire to map and organize the space. Mazzei’s work is charged with Baroque and narrative elements from her scenic installations, which she transposes into textiles. They contrast with the graphic minimalism of Díaz Reyes, whose dreamlike, metaphysical scenes wait to be populated by the imagination of those who view the installed works.

The desire to work with a new material is experimental in essence, not only by incorporating new tapestry techniques in the resulting work but also, in the case of Reyes, the entire production process, where he includes the color samples made throughout the weaving process. The rich background of the artists serves to strengthen and enrich the result of this exploration of new horizons.