The formal characteristics of painting are an important aspect of Francisca Aninat’s work. She rethinks the corporeality of painting as a fragile materiality that is able to hold itself together merely by its seams. Exploring the material and theoretical supports of painting in a time when installation and new media have become an almost official language and challenged traditional artistic practices, Aninat deconstructs pictorial tradition to its basic elements: color, plane, canvas-fabric, and then conducts an act of reparation of painting which nevertheless involves its progressive dismantling.

Aninat begins by loosely applying dense pigment on the canvas, dying the fabric with few colors, and then tearing the pigmented support into shreds. Recollecting the pieces, she saws the fragments of fabric together, stitching the scraps in expanding surfaces of painted material, the joints of which exhibited its reparatory action but also made evident the fragility of the new painting’s unions. When hanged, the weight of the painted canvas pulls down the subtle needlework, forcing the painting to gradually fall under its own burden. The processual nature of painting is exhibited and also manifests the material load of painting’s past, reflecting at the same time the precariousness of the manual work that is associated to it, a handling which has suffered recurrent blows from new technologies and yet is still there to sustain it. Aninat’s dismantling of painting is an act of deconstruction and exhibition of a pictorial tradition that hangs on its lasts threads.

Francisca Aninat unravels the support of painting to reveal its weight, fragility, transparency, and density as an unfolding of threads. Prepared canvases are slowly unraveled into its basic components, closely woven threads, forming masses of light textile that fall into flexible sculptural forms that transform the rectangular frame of the painting. This act of expansion and deconstruction is continued in sewn paintings that are hanged from the ceiling, forming amorphous volumes that forcefully weight down the painting and reveal its precarious condition and aspirations of verticality. The activation of space is once again sought through the paintings horizontal growth, taking over the surfaces of the gallery’s walls as a breaking away from the constrictions and limits of the canvas.

[Extract from the Curatorial text of Acts of Translations by Carla Macchiavello, 2006]