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Defensor de Oficio
Public defender
Art
Contemporary
Unpublished
Year
2023
Artist
Francisco Morales,
Public defender is a concept that has two meanings in itself.
One of them, the most provocative, refers to people who have committed a crime and do not have the resources to hire a lawyer. In these cases, they are assigned a public defender.
The other suggests the lack of interest in our time in preserving and giving continuity to ancestral trades, (oficios) to artisan processes, and to the use of the arts and crafts.
Implicit in this project is the irony of double meaning. In our era of digital manipulation, Francisco Morales pursues the rescue and preservation of the freehand stroke, improvisation, the generation of patterns and gestures in danger of extinction. The artist seeks the possibility of going back to basics, of bringing to the forefront the original principle of an apparently simple idea that can be sophisticated to unsuspected limits. As in previous projects, he sticks to the challenge of resignifying the use of materials and instruments as elementary as the pencil, the common pen and in this particular case the wax crayon, to the point (in the figurative sense) of paying tribute to them, of glorifying them. The images allude, on the one hand, to the network, from its simplest conception to think of the complexity of social dynamics, this interweaving of our family, interpersonal and work relationships, and which extend to our wider environment. In the end, our life takes place in a weaving of our own wefts, weaving our own edges.
However, this double play of concepts is also a representation of textiles as a universal pattern. For the most part, the pieces that make up the project are emulations of textiles. They are made from wax crayon. The calligraphic features are superimposed, layer by layer, forming a sort of lattice with a clear sense of volume. The lines are generated gesturally in an effort to give the pulse a will of its own. The imperfection gives it a warmer, more human aspect. The fragmented strokes and chromatic combinations make the pieces vibrate visually, like the appearance of a wool fabric. In a sort of inverted process, it is not the drawing that will serve as a guide to make a textile, but the drawing is an approach to the appearance of textiles embroidered on traditional looms.
