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Artist's Statement on High-Warp Tapestries:
Twenty years of experience in Latin America, twenty years of sun, here and across the Andes, from the red waters of the Rio de la Plata to the colorful houses of Santiago of Chile, Pia Kalfon's love for colors was born there and became the engine of her creations. She began to draw, to assemble, to build with her hands, and then she could not stop. She returned to Paris where she was born, and launched into her creative experimentations at the school des Arts Decoratifs. There she learned how to work with wool, silk, cotton, the immediate, living materials that you touch & feel. In Pia's high-warp tapestries, the texture allows the medium to go farther, as opposed to traditional methods, and the colors is utilized without stopping on a set design. When mounted in preparation for the warp yarn with long vertical grooves, Pia does not have a set composition in mind, but only speculates on what she will "write" on that blank page. Then, using carefully chosen shades of wool, with a single gesture that will last for two, three or more months, she launches herself into the weaving. Although the arrangement of objects and structures in the tapestry image is improvisational, the colors structure the composition, responding to the variation within the theme. Pia's woven "stories" reach their end when the last thread is cut and the "arazzo" is ready to be hung.
Since 1980 Pia has lived in Tuscany, another where she has raised a family and has never stopped creating tapestries that are "retablos" approximate term to describe her famous "memory boxes". A laborious work built from fragments of experience, objects are not well identified, anomalous, retrieved, processed, invented, juxtaposed, married to each other by similarity of subject, color, theme, atmosphere. And in this collection of many things taken here and there, of what we have in the back of drawers or the bottom of the pockets, broken things, often insignificant, but when framed by Pia's art, they put on weight, concreteness, and respect. All this is interwoven by Pia's art almost by accident as circulating disorderly atoms will at some point stop, materialize and finalize into the memory of things. |
