María and Eduardo Dávila Portillo

Textiles by María and Eduardo Dávila Portillo

María and Eduardo Dávila Portillo are Venezuelan textile artists who create complex textile works fashioned from multiple materials. They have studied all aspects of their artwork from the sources of their materials to the traditional dyeing and weaving techniques of India, China, and the Andes Mountains of Venezuela.

Maria Eugenia Dávila was born in Mérida, Venezuela in 1966; Eduardo Portillo, also born in 1966, is from the more northern city of Jajó, Venezuela. Since 1983, they have been devoted to creations fashioned from silk and natural dyes. Twenty years later, Dávila and Portillo studied and integrated their own country’s fibers, derived from bromeliads, palms and roots, into their silk fabric works.

Long-lasting fibers from the moriche palm, the perennial curague, and the cactus family’s chique-chique had traditionally been used to produce threads, cords, and fishing nets. The incorporation of these fibers into the silk works of Dávila and Portillo gave their work a new look but also required new techniques for inducing color into the fibers. They eventually developed “Mosaics”, a convergence of all previously used patterns and natural dyes in their projects, which became a template for the integration of silk and Venezuelan fibers.

At the beginning of their career, María and Eduardo Dávila Portillo traveled to China and India to better understand the properties and production of silk as well as the traditional techniques of indigo dye making. They spent several years studying sericulture, or silk farming, in order to produce their own silk from a vertical integrated model in the mountains of Mèrida, Venezuela. Their silk farming project developed from silkworm larvae found in the Canary Islands and seeds from Morera trees, commonly known as mulberry trees. The leaves of these mulberry trees provide food for the silkworms, which when grown produce the silk threads that are transformed into textiles.

Dávila and Portillo see color as an essential element of textile work, one that interacts smoothly with the work’s surface, fiber, texture and structure. Already fascinated by their local natural dyes, they became inspired by lecturer and artist Jenny Balfour-Paul’s 1998 botanical study “Indigo”. Dávila and Portillo traveled to Thailand, India and China to study this traditional organic source of blue color. The indigo plant is a shrub, either annual or perennial depending on the climate, whose leaves are processed to obtain the dye. Soaked in water and fermented, the leaves convert the colorless compound glycoside indican, naturally present in the plant, to the blue dye indigotin.

María and Eduardo Dávila Portillo returned to Venezuela with indigo paste, powder, recipes, indigo seeds and the understanding that the process of indigo dye is more a culture than the color itself. Recognizing that the color blue one sees depends on the setting as well as the time of day, they created indigo tapestries of shaded mosaics and blocks to represent the various color perceptions. Dávila and Portillo’s tapestries from this project, depicting specific times of the day, were showcased in an exhibition that highlighted indigo’s historic color and culture, the December 2012 “Azul Indigo”, held at Caracas, Venezuela.

Dávila and Portillo are now experimenting in the colors of metal. Using metals as textile material, they are working with steel, bronze and copper in casting sculptural works of varied patinas and colors. Dávila and Portillo use their woven textiles to create shapes with folds and wrinkles. Molds of these textile shapes are then prepared for bronze casting. Dávila and Portillo’s exploration of the patina process led to the mixing of copper ribbons with metallic threads of copper, steel, gold and silver which are then woven into their tapestries.

María and Eduardo Dávila Portillo are recipients of a Smithsonian Art Research Fellowship and a Josef and Anni Albers Foundation Residency. Their work is recognized by UNESCO as a contribution to sustainable practices. Dávila and Portillo are members of the Textile Society of America, a platform dedicated to the exchange and diffusion of textiles. They share their vast knowledge by lecturing in conferences across the US, Central and South America, and Europe.

Dávila and Portillo’s work is part of public and private collections worldwide, including the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, England; Longhouse Reserve, a sixteen-acre garden and sculpture museum in East Hampton, New York; the Cooper Hewitt-Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City; the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio; and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Notes: The Art Institute of Chicago has an interview with textile artists Dávila and Portillo led by Associate Textile Conservator Isaac Faccio, entitled “Anatomy of a White Dwarf: On Life, Home, and Weaving” at: https://www.artic.edu/articles/1134/anatomy-of-a-white-dwarf-on-life-home-and-weaving

Wilton, Connecticut’s sculpture and textile gallery Browngrotta Arts is a representative of Dávila and Portillo’s work in the United States. An article on the artists’ work and an inventory of available textiles can be found at the Browngrotta Arts site: https://browngrotta.com/artists/Eduardo-Maria-Eugenia-Davila-portillo

Second Insert Image: Dávila and Portillo, “Océano Cósmico”, 2022, Detail, Silk, Moriche, Alpaca, Cotton, Indigo and Copper Leaf, 150 x 79 cm, Browngrotta Arts

Third Insert Image: Dávila and Portillo, “Encontrada”, 2013, “New Territories” Series, Cast Bronze, 21 x 22 cm, Museum of Art and Design, New York

Bottom Insert Image: Dávila and Portillo, “Clev 1”, 2019, Detail, Silk, Alpaca, Moriche, Metallic Fiber, Silver Leaf, Natural Dyes, 209 x 63cm, Private Collection

Feliciano Centurión

The Textile Art of Feliciano Centurión

Born in the city of San Ignacio, Misiones in March of 1962, Feliciano Centurión was a Paraguayan artist known for his painting and textile work that incorporated painting, knitting, crocheting and embroidering. He was raised in a matriarchal household where he was taught the traditional crafts normally associated with women’s work.

Feliciano Centurión’s family fled to Formosa, Argentina to escape the military dictatorship of Paraguayan President Alfredo Stroessner. He received his initial art education in the visual arts at Formosa’s Oscar R. Albertozzi School of Fine Arts. Centurión permanently relocated to Buenos Aires where he studied painting at the Ernesto de la Cárcova Superior School of Fine Arts and the Prilidiano Pueyrredón School of Fine Arts. He earned the National Professor and Superior Professor of Painting degrees.

Centurión incorporated ordinary household items into his artwork, such as blankets (frazadas), handkerchiefs, and pillowcases which he purchased at local street markets. His textile work followed the weaving traditions held by the indigenous Guaraní people of the interior regions of South America, particularly those of Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Bolivia. Centurión also integrated the technique of ñandutí, an intricate method of lace weaving that was traditionally taught from mother to daughter. His design motifs included images of both flora and fauna as well as diaristic texts.

After surviving the dictatorships in both Paraguay and Argentina, Feliciano Centurión thrived in Argentina after the collapse of the country’s authoritarian regime in 1983. He became associated with the Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas, a cultural center operated by the University of Buenos Aires, where he became acquainted with the work of other young artists. Centurión incorporated the kitsch references and queer aesthetics of these artists into his painting and embroidery work now being done on inexpensive, patterned blankets. Established as an artist, he participated in thirty-one solo exhibitions in Argentina and Paraguay between 1990 and 1996.

Diagnosed with HIV in 1992 at a time when no accessible treatments were available, Centurión began chronicling his declining health by weaving texts into increasingly smaller and more intricate fabrics. At a time when government policies and media reports stigmatized the virus and its victims, he expressed humanizing, sentimental notions of comfort and intimacy into his fabric work. Centurión’s works were composed of bright colors and animals, such as snails and crocodiles, remembered from his childhood. His blankets celebrated both his matriarchal upbringing and Paraguay heritage; he used his embroidered work to express his queer identity and elevate the status of textile art.

Feliciano Centurión had his first solo exhibition in 1982 at the Estimulo del Belles Artes in Asunción, Paraguay, and represented Paraguay at the fifth Havana Biennial in 1994. His final works, a series of embroidered pillows, were made while he was hospitalized. Centurión died on the seventh of November of 1996 at the age of thirty-four in Buenos Aires.

A retrospective of Centurión’s work was exhibited in 2018 at the 33rd São Paulo Biennial in Brazil. The Americas Society/Council of Americas (AS/COA) held the first solo exhibition of his work in the United States from February to November of 2020. Held at its Park Avenue gallery in New York City, this exhibition received the support of the WaldenGallery, Galeria Millan, and Cecilia Brunson Projects as well as the City of New York. Centurión’s work is included in the current 2024 exhibition, “The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art”, at London’s Barbican Art Gallery until the 26th of May.

Notes: The exhibition catalogue “Feliciano Centurión: Abrigo” from the Americas Society/Council of Americas’s 2020 exhibition, which contains the exhibited work and an extensive biography, can be located at: https://www.as-coa.org/sites/default/files/archive/FelicianoCenturionPocketBook.pdf

The Visual AIDS site has a tribute page to Centurión which contains a short biography and an online collection of over fifty images of his work: https://visualaids.org/artists/feliciano-centurion

Second Insert Image: Feliciano Centurión, “Flamencos”, circa 1990, Acrylic on Blanket, 42 x 53 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Feliciano Centurión, “Surubí”, 1992, Acrylic and Varnish on Blanket, 200 x 190 cm, Private Collection

Alexandra Kehayoglou

Alexandra Kehayoglou, Landscape Carpets and Rugs

Using scraps leftover thread from her family’s carpet factory in Buenos Aires, artist Alexandra Kehayoglou embarks on a laborious hand-tufting process to fabricate wool carpets and rugs that mimic natural textures like moss, water, trees, and pastures. The carpets balance form and function and can powerfully transform an entire room into a lush meadow dotted with pools of water and tufts of grass. Many of her works even function as part tapestry and flow from walls to floor, or work as covers for chairs or stools.

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