‘SILK / SEDA’
WALL HANGING / TAPESTRY
by NOÉMI KISS, Austria 2023
SIZE: L: 340 cm W: 237 cm // L: 13.85" W: 93.3"
MATERIAL: overpainted, salvaged, oriental-style rug, hand-knotted. The original rug is a ‘Kerman’ / ‘Kirman’, in Louis XVI style french design, approximately from the 1930ies.
Kerman rug is a traditional classification of a Persian carpet. Kerman is a city and province located in south-central Iran. Kerman has been a major centre for the production of high-quality carpets since the 15th century.
SEDA/SILK is a huge overpainted, salvaged oriental-style rug, where the artist Noemi Kiss uses skillfully her interventions to make the rug look like a smooth silk cloth in folds.
Through overpainting the rug Noemi Kiss creates this fascinating optical illusion of a twisted, rugged rug.
The artist Kiss has concentrated in her oeuvre on out-of-use rugs, damaged rugs, or the unwanted, where she applies her artistic interventions. She is a master in creating an impressive illusion, through overpainting or cutting the re-purposed oriental rugs. Laboriously woven or knotted by hand, oriental rugs tell stories, interwoven in the piece. The ornaments have strong meanings. A rug can be decorative furnishing, a symbol of paradise, or a placeholder for prayer. The artist uses this strong symbolism and marries it with interventions of her choice, like cutting, overpainting, or gilding.
During its lifetime a rug is traded, bought, possibly resold, used over decades by various people in various locations….layering the piece with another history of its usage. Foot-worn carpets are witnesses of their past. One cannot simply copy them. Wear and tear, this 'Design of Time' of the rug is a vital part and the basis for Noémi's artworks. Here the aesthetics are to be understood as a state of the art that cannot be produced intentionally. Such surfaces develop slowly and on their own - through human interaction and use. Noémi is a material fetishist and she lets collide the grown with the made. She loads banal substances and materials that feel distant from art with a new meaning.
CAN HANG, BOTH VERTICALLY AND HORIZONTALLY
Images from the ZONA MACO art fair 2023, in Mexico City, where the piece was first presented.
