Lygia Pape - Selected Artworks - "The Tecelares Series"

"The Tecelares Series"

The series was produced over the course of half a decade and represents Lygia Pape's transition from Concrete art in the late 1950s to Neo-concrete art in the early 1960s. The Tecelares wood prints were originally seen purely as works of Concrete art because of their precise and geometric aesthetic. The woodblock prints are minimalistic; they feature planes of black ink and thin lines that reveal the white rice paper underneath. The production of the series seems straightforward: Pape incised the entire surface of the woodblock with thin lines, adding several non-orthogonal lines to create the appearance of distinct planes and the suggestion of movement and space in a work that would be otherwise flat and static. In Tecelares, Lygia Pape used "weaving" as a metaphor to evoke handiwork and a connection to Brazil's traditional and indigenous culture. Pape spoke of how indigenous Brazilian cultures had used geometry to express fundamental concepts, like the concept of collective identity. THus, for Lygia Pape, geometry didn’t represent industry or mechanization, but rather it expressed a transcendent idiom. Instead of using a gridded and rigid composition, Pape blended natural and organic patterns with incised lines that are intertwined to "warp and weft." Pape used simple materials, crafted minimally by her own hands to incorporate expression into a work that is not expressionistic. In so doing, the vitality of the materials surface, as do the "relationships of the open and closed space, the sensitive and non-discursive thing."