Born in 1990 in Bourges, Lux Miranda is a franco-portuguese visual artist, mainly focused on tapestry-making / installations.
Represented by the gallery the Pill in Istanbul, she's currently living and working in Paris.
PRESS
Lux Miranda — Sleeping With Ghosts
25.07.2021 - 25.10.2021
“We can hardly conceive the possibility of a mode of expression in which thought is graphically organized in a so to speak radiant manner.”
André Leroi-Gourhan, Le Geste et la parole, vol. 1, Technique et langage, 1965
Together with her previous large ensemble of twelve rugs, Sleeping with ghosts (2020), Lux Miranda presents her latest work, EQUINOXE-X (2021), at The Pill gallery. The artist's rugs are rooted in her mutually complementary practices of sculpture and drawing. From her sculpture, she keeps the irregular and organic forms of the distinct elements that compose a large carpet: these surfaces have contours that are designed to give them a specific presence in the space. In the same way that one turns around a sculpture, one can turn around her rugs. Placed on the ground, their hold on vertical space gives them a sculptural volume. Drawing remains the basis of the motifs that punctuate the surface of her rugs. But if her sculptures as well as her drawings are achrome, her carpets are on the contrary shimmering and have brought into her work colors with the powdered depths of natural wool. When she returned to France from a long stay in Mexico, where she saw textiles with bright tints and in particular wools that simultaneously captured and reflected light and color, she gradually took hold of them.
The process behind the artist's carpets keeps drawing as the primary step. The forms drawn by Lux Miranda are nourished by the more or less conscious synthesis of images absorbed in large quantities. Through the prism of an inner digestion, this myriad of elements is crystallized into a synthetic symbolic language, tending towards a form of universality, which constitutes the raw material of the artist's drawings. These are generated during meditative moments during which she observes her inner sensations, seeking a form of mindfulness of an exacerbated mental state and the process that led her there. It is this process that is then transcribed in a visual, formal, colored and rhythmic way, in the form of a drawing that takes on the value of a map or a plan in volume, but also of a "sigil", the graphic materialization of a magical intention. This work of symbolic figuration is similar to "picto-ideography", an ideography that predates writing, conceptualized by André Leroi-Gourhan in Le Geste et la parole (1965). The thought thus synthesized is as if infused into the woolly thickness of the carpet. It gives the object the power to trigger or accompany those who project themselves into an inner journey, in the manner of the thangkas of Tibetan mandalas, paintings that serve as a support for meditation.
Lux Miranda's carpets do not contain an energy of vindication but of concentration. The artist sees them more as a place of comfort, of distance, a soothing prism that captures the viewer to focus him in and on himself, and thus lead him to an exercise of active listening to himself and the world. Their experience must provide a state of childlike wonder and refuse any form of intellectual challenge: one is not evaluated in front of these carpets, but welcomed by them. The choice of the carpet object is revealing in this respect. Close to the daily and intimate sphere, where the carpet is simultaneously soundproofing, insulating, decorative and synonymous with comfort, the artwork reassures by its very nature. Her work echoes the "objets-plus" described in 1989 by the critic and art historian Pierre Restany, who analyses "the added value, both semantic and cultural, that attaches itself to industrial products as a result of their entry into art" and defines objets-plus as " devices for deviating the art-production relationship, at the limit of art and product.”
The carpet also has an evocative power. In his essay, Les espaces autres, for the catalogue of the significant exhibition Decorum. Tapis et tapisseries d'artistes (Musée d'Art moderne de Paris, 11 October 2013 - 9 February 2014), Alexandre Costanzo linked carpets to the concept of heterotopia developed by the philosopher Michel Foucault in 1967. The latter presents heterotopias as utopias with a very precise and real space, spatiotemporal units, space-time in which one is and one is not (such as the mirror, the cemetery), or where one is another (the brothel, the holiday village, the party). For Costanzo, carpets also belong to these "other spaces" "in which children take refuge, at the bottom of the garden, in the attic, or in the parents' big bed where, in their absence, one discovers the ocean since one can swim between the covers, but also the sky, the forest, the night." The idea applies particularly well to Lux Miranda's carpets, which are a proposal for a journey into an autonomous and encompassing space.
In this respect, it is important to emphasize that while they can be hung on the wall to complete an all-encompassing experience, the artist's carpets are essentially conceived as surfaces to be placed on the ground. When on the floor, they develop more easily that third dimension that links them to sculpture. Their size itself is an invitation to a physical experience, requiring to take off one's shoes to walk on them and better invest oneself in a process of inner journey, even an initiatory rite. It is not insignificant that this first solo show presenting Lux Miranda's carpets takes place at The Pill gallery: this important dimension of Lux Miranda's work will perhaps be better understood in Istanbul than somewhere else !
Clara Roca
Curator – Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris
Lux Miranda’s rugs are rich with an expansive energy. Each one, or rather each group of them, exceed and overwhelm us, just as they drawn us in and absorb us. At first, we take this as the accomplishment of an aesthetic strategy: previously working with drawing and sculpture, the artist switched to weaving two years ago. Through wool’s materiality, the practice enriches her colors with a vibratory quality, while its versatile flatness negotiates volume’s overwhelming triumphalism – her rugs can be shown hung on the wall as well as lying flat on the ground. What draws us to them in the first place is their bodily presence, which transforms a merely visual perception – a face-to-face, rational experience – into a fully haptic, subjective encounter.
About weaving, Lux Miranda underlines how she values the physical part that it entails. Her large-scale formats, such as Sleeping with ghosts (2020), a twelve-part composition, or EQUINOXE-X (2012), which is ten meters long, involve the artist’s body just as much as the spectator’s. Similarly, the rugs’ patterns derive as much from a project than a process. Originating from a vocabulary of shapes and symbols gathered by the artist, their materialization on the tapestry, a repetitive activity not unlike meditation, infuse them with a blossoming energy. As such, the work’s vital vibrancy as a whole, as well as the cultural and symbolic ambiguity of its parts, bring up yet another dimension.
As we encounter her tumultuous universes, studded with nascent figures still hidden in the folds of potentiality, we feel slightly dizzy. It is as if we were gazing into a vast abyss about to reveal itself: nothing there is fixed for good. Lux-Miranda’s compositions are polycentric, and their elements yet to be born. Rather than a finite cosmos, the works bring forth a perpetually reconfiguring energetic field. As such, our aesthetic approach also induces an anthropological one: a way of relating to the world by surrendering to it rather than trying to decipher it. On the surface of the artist’s rugs, something becomes visible which true nature remains uncertain; something that whispers to the senses while staying cautious not to be named, captured or reified.
Since a few years already, philosophical and anthropological theory has adopted the lexical field of weaving as a scheme to undo former binary hierarchies. At the crossing of ecological and cybernetic investigations, the world and its entities, human and non-human, material and immaterial, thus emerge anew through networks and rhizomes, knots and entanglements. In a similar manner, Lux-Miranda’s serpentine lines tie back up suppressed alliances between art and craftmanship, the eye and the hand, but also science and intuition, concept and imagination. In this respect, the unborn creatures dwelling in her ecosystems are akin to those favored by thinkers to represent their speculative worlds.
Combining human, animal and machinic reigns, as well as natural, scientific and technical fields, Donna Haraway’s cyborg or Vilém Flusser’s vampire squid from hell (Vampyroteuthis infernalis) play the role of intercessors on the path to a fluid reconciliation of modernity’s polarities. As we grow accustomed to Lux-Miranda’s work, we gradually start to identify outlines of snakes, dragons or chimeras in them: those are the ones which, to quote anthropologist Tim Ingold’s 2013 essay Walking with Dragons, inhabit “the rupture between reality and imagination”. However, in order to perceive those nascent, fanciful creatures, we must ourselves unlearn an inherited and instinctively adopted rationality, the one which still guides our steps and defines our perceptual apparatus.
Lux Miranda’s compositions are the first encounter with the post-rational dragon. Her rugs, in so far as they call for loosing oneself in the physical world’s folds, for plunging further into its depth and for roaming among its intricate folds and creases, reconnect us with a forgotten part of ourselves numbed by social life and predefined thought-patterns. Only by responding to this call and through it becoming one with the chimeric assemblages that populate the world’s interstitial spaces will we be guided towards a new sensory ecology and its intrinsic promise of more intensely vibrant worlds.
Ingrid Luquet-Gad, writer and art critic.