odabashian weaves edgar orlaineta's biomorphic sculptures into gobelin-style tapestries

The Dynamo & The Venus by Edgar Orlaineta x Odabashian

‘The Dynamo’ and ‘The Venus’ by Edgar Orlaineta is a pair of tapestries produced in collaboration with the luxury rug manufacturers Odabashian for the ongoing exhibition at Centro Cultural La Tallera, in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Odabashian’s fondness for traditional techniques and fine aesthetics weaves seamlessly with Orlaineta’s passion for hybrid sculptural forms that draw from modernism, pop culture, and historical references. The result sees two limited edition pieces that translate the artist’s sculptures — two curvaceous figures that represent a male and a female body in an abstract form — into meticulously crafted gobelin-style tapestries.

Orlaineta’s work experiments with shapes, driven by his intuition, letting his hands improvise. His oeuvres explore our connection with the objects, how we are related to them, and the meaning and value we decide to give. The artist came up with the idea of the two figures, drawing inspiration from a chapter of the book ‘The Education of Henry Adams’, an autobiography published in 1900. Orlaineta connected with the passion of the American historian talking about the affinity between nature and technology, spirituality and science, and saw himself molding his own analogies between these intangible worlds.

all images by @DeduceDesign

translated into a two-dimensional expression

The collective work is materialized as a translation of the artist’s biomorphic figures into textile art brought to life by the luxury rug makers. The outcome echoes the closeness of the original, introducing a two-dimensional rendition created with honesty and precision.‘I was interested in the relationship with the objects and how energy is transformed. I took a piece of wood and turned it into a shape with my hands. And then, somebody made an interpretation of my work in a bi-dimensional piece of tapestry. This translation, or transformation process, was what appealed to me,’ shared Edgar Orlaineta.

Each piece’s form derives from humans’ need to perceive and give meaning to complicated things that sometimes lack understanding. ‘We use science to discover the world, to understand the world. We make these exercises and repeat them, so we know how things function, but at the end, there are these basic forces like gravity or things that we can never really understand. And spirituality is similar in a way, at the end, there’s something that we cannot really understand. So, I guess this is the question for me and this inspires the pieces. I turned The Dynamo into a male figure and The Venus into an abstract, primitive shape of a woman that represents fertility,’ adds the artist.

‘Lately, I’ve been very interested in craftsmanship more than craft and I have been working directly with wood. When you get very used to working with a material such as wood you start working automatically, that ‘space’ or ‘moment’ of becoming automatic is something I’m trying to understand and explore. I have been reflecting on this phenomenon of how we as humans transform matter, and how matter also transforms us,’ he continues.

biomorphic sculptures translated into delicate tapestries

Running until February 19, 2023, the show takes place at La Tallera in Cuernavaca, which used to be David Alfaro Siqueiros’ workshop where he did his murals. Apart from the aforementioned tapestries, the venue accommodates a lot of new pieces, including sculptures, and blown glasses created by the artist. ‘The work explores several modernist pieces like a metal house that was made in the early 1930s for Ruth Page, a ballerina from Illinois that was, for some time, the lover of Isamu Noguchi. There are pieces that refer to the sculptures of Noguchi also. What I am interested in from this period is the idea of modernism and progress and the critiques and skepticism around ‘progress’ or this idea that society or the world is getting better and better.’