In Fio d'água, Laura Villarosa brings together a set of imagined landscapes in which painting and embroidery operate in a regime of equivalence. In the words of Priscyla Gomes, author of the exhibition's critical text, the compositions evoke "a place that precedes the map." These are surfaces traversed by lines and reliefs that seem to precede any attempt at geographic localization. The image is formed through the patient accumulation of gesture, outside any direct figurative register and in refusal of the literal representation of the natural world. Journalist and critic Mario Gioia describes this operation as a practice in which the artist "unfolds seductive materialities at the crossings of the languages of painting and fabric."
In Villarosa's work, embroidery functions as an autonomous visual language and as a method of thought. Each thread laid upon the fabric contributes to the thickening of the image. The line structures volumes and organizes zones of visibility, establishing a regime in which what is shown depends on what is concealed. The landscapes result from overlays accumulated over an extended span of time, and that duration remains inscribed in the body of the work. In each piece there is a slow temporality that offers itself to the gaze as part of what is being seen.
The investigation of materials structures the process from end to end. Villarosa works with threads of varied origins: some come from specialized suppliers; some arrive through affective circuits, donations made by those who follow her production closely. Natural threads coexist with synthetic ones in the same piece, handcrafted materials alongside industrial ones. As Priscyla Gomes observes, "the choice of threads approaches the choice of pigments." The artist assesses the color a thread carries and the way it absorbs or returns light. She also considers the texture each material imparts to the surface when set down in a layer. From these criteria emerges the palette of each landscape, defined by the material even before any idea of an image.
The works gathered in the exhibition propose a form of thought enacted through texture. The embroidered fabric there acquires the density of a pictorial field and the sensitivity of a skin, subjected to the same economy of procedures that organizes painting. For Mario Gioia, it is on this terrain that "the entangled gestures of painting and weaving create a vigorous authorial mark that never ceases to surprise." Fio d'água names this condition: that of an image made by accumulation, in which each layer modifies the whole without undoing the work's internal continuity.
