TEXTILE BEAUTIES AND BEASTS

Guest blog post by writer, poet, cultural critic and artist Haris Metaxa. There are some exhibitions that prompt you to re-think an artistic medium or definition. This is the case here. It is textile art, and yet it defies the stereotype that textile art is soft art, always a bit lost in crafts and in sweet womanly creations, a half-lit, half-formed, half-grown universe which cannot address the main questions and worries of “serious”, mainly male, hard contemporary art. Well, forget your prejudices. Textile art, women making art using the textile medium in its infinite variations and combinations can be as delicate but strong, as soft but rigorous, as stylistically pure but expressive as any “hard” sculpture. You do not need steel, marble or huge formats to talk about life, death, identity, body, nature, poetry, emotional memory or the four elements and our place in the world. You have all of it in this two part textile exhibition, successfully showing both the joy (first part, Saint-Cloud) and the pain (second part, Viroflay) our lives are a mixture of. Textile beauties and beasts and you will love them both. There are opposite but balanced elements of the same whole, each one requiring the other in order to exist. Dialectic balance of opposites, in Art like in life and a very good curatorial choice indeed... All this is the gift of talented, warm-hearted duo of Mother (Sylvie Breton) and Daughter (Marion Breton), committed to intercultural emotional pull and versatility of textile creation, both by contemporary artists and ordinary people alike. People are invited to participate in patchwork creations that are later combined to form large works successfully presented alongside the professionals. The exhibition is called “regards textiles I et II” (Textile views & II,)  the 2nd part just opening on the 3^rd of November in Viroflay while the first part opened last month in Saint-Cloud, famous for its international rose festival and now maybe for its colourful, celebratory textile art creation. In other words, go see the happy beauties followed by the happy beasts. Regards Textile(s) Until 4 December Galerie À l’Écu de France 1, rue Robert Cahen 78221 Viroflay - France Free entry, daily from 14pm to 19pm www.marionbreton-sylviebreton.com