Teresa Lanceta, Against the Grain
négoces du Raval, 2019-2022), avait pour ambition de rendre compte de la mémoire vivante de ses habitants et de ses travailleurs, et notamment de leurs trajectoires migratoires. Carte numérique partagée, photos, récits… Le résultat se laisse difficilement appréhender comme « oeuvre ». Il n’en enregistre que mieux ce bruissement de la modernité urbaine qui, par de longs détours, aura été le fil conducteur de la production de Teresa Lanceta.
Respectivement du 8 avril au 11 septembre 2022 et du 6 octobre 2022 au 12 février 2023. 2 Jean-Christophe Bailly, le Dépaysement, Seuil, 2011. 3 Dont témoigne la collection Rafael Tous, qui a fait en 2020 l’objet d’une donation au Macba. La collection de Bert Flint est exposée au musée Tiskiwin, à Marrakech. Le titre de la rétrospective est explicite : Tejer como código abierto (le tissage comme open source). Épisode décisif de la guerre d’Espagne, la bataille a inspiré la célèbre chanson républicaine El paso del Ebro.
Laurent Perez est critique littéraire, critique d’art et traducteur littéraire.
Teresa Lanceta
Née en born in 1951 à in Barcelone
Vit et travaille à lives and works in Alicante et and Barcelone
Expositions personnelles récentes Solo shows: 2023 Tejer como código abierto, Ivam, Valence 2022 Tejer como código abierto, Macba, Barcelone Expositions collectives récentes Group shows:
Felices para siempre, The Ryder, Madrid ; Digerir el mundo donde está, CaixaForum, Barcelone ; ATLAS, Palacio San Esteban, Murcie ; Anidar en el gesto, Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia, Cerezales del Condado
2021 Tejido doble, Pie.fmc, Séville
2020 Actually, the Dead Are Not Dead, Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart
1987. (Coll. part.)
The recent retrospective devoted to Teresa Lanceta by the Museu d’Art Contemporáneo de Barcelona (Macba) and the Institut Valencien d’Art Moderne (Ivam) highlighted her role as a pioneer of contemporary textile art.
Teresa Lanceta’s work is vast and ambitious. The artist, who was born in 1950, has only recently established herself on the international scene, with the biennales of São Paulo in 2014 and Venice in 2017. Under the direction of Nuria Enguita and Laura Vallés Vilchez, the double retrospective recently devoted to her by Barcelona’s Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (Macba) and the Institut Valencien d’Art Moderne (Ivam) [1] highlighted the contemporary nature of this eminently situated art.
Teresa Lanceta’s project was born in the relatively narrow confines of Barcelona’s working-class Raval district, where the artist rented a room from a Gypsy family as a young student in the early 1970s. At the time, the Raval—or Barrio Xino (“Chinatown” meaning “weird” or “queer”)—was a kind of skid row where Gypsies, Andalusian immigrants, drug addicts, ex-convicts from all over the world, prostitutes of both sexes and real and fake handicapped people lived side by side. All this—documented by the remarkable autobiographical accounts in the catalogue—evokes what Jean-Christophe Bailly calls the “bariol,” “an intensity of variety [...] that ends up [...] bordering on the notion of a haphazard, even vulgar assemblage.” (2) A kind of collage that is like the spontaneous emanation of life, and whose spirit Teresa Lanceta has been transposing into her carpets since 1972.
REPETITION, EXCESS
This option, which she has maintained to this day, put her at odds with the avant-garde of her time, especially in Catalonia, where conceptual art was in vogue, (3) and largely excluded her work from the art market. In reality, Lanceta criticised “international” art for that which links it to modernity in general: the centrality of the artist and his or her distance from the social context. Weaving, she explained, is on the contrary a collective and popular practice, rooted less in a technique than in a site and social relations. Hanging pell-mell in the first room of the Ivam exhibition, all eras combined, Lanceta’s carpets oscillate between abstract forms— horizontal lines, geometric or curved motifs in the style of Kandinsky or Miró, contrasting colours—and what can only be described as landscapes, dotted with recognisable figures. For the artist, who has always been keen to decentre herself, abstraction and landscapes are really only worthwhile for the tension that arises between them, and its capacity to make her question her relationship to her technique.
In the early 1980s, Lanceta embarked on a long-term project amongst the Berber weavers of the Middle Atlas, whom she visited several times in the company of the Dutch ethnologist Bert Flint. (4) The Berber motifs, which inspired her work for almost thirty years, suggested the notion of open source, borrowed from computer science, to designate the practice of weaving: a corpus of available forms, accessible to all, that each person is free to develop in their own way, from within. (5) Juxtaposing traditional fabrics and carpets of her own making, and as if to pre-empt the accusation of cultural appropriation, she asserted an element of anonymity. More than a feminine or feminist theme, it was the sense of materiality that appealed to her, and to which she attributed a critical value: that of a functional form of art, part of an oral transmission, collaborative, less international than universal. The conditions in which these carpets were produced, in a semi-nomadic context, give them a kind of formal freedom poised between repetition and excess, with offbeat frames, breaks in rhythm and a tendency towards all-over expansion.
In contrast, the fifteenth-century Spanish carpets she subsequently worked on were characterised by the discipline and hierarchy imposed on the forms. In the service of the Christian feudal lords of the Reconquest, the virtuosity of the Moorish craftsmen of Al-Andalus was channelled and ordered by the framework of the shields and weapons that adorned them. Lanceta’s paintings on black paper, inspired by these productions, confront this rigidity, constituting some of the finest works in the show. Empty spaces interrupt a tightly woven mesh saturated with heraldic symbols, sometimes drawing implicit silhouettes reminiscent of those of Djamel Tatah, with the same powerful interrogation of the possibility of human presence, if not of all figuration.
Over the last ten years or so,Teresa Lanceta’s approach has become more attuned to her time, her concerns and her processes. Her attachment to collaborative and even collegial modes of production, and to popular traditions, took a directly documentary turn in Cierre es la respuesta (The answer is closure, 2011), a video that superimposes photo