Algoritmo

Solar Tacubaya presents the inaugural exhibition Algoritmo, an exhibition conceived by Omar Rodríguez-Graham and Morgana Ludlow.

To weave is to calculate. Before the first thread becomes weft within the warp, before the first knot blocks the pigment, the structure already exists as an ordered sequence of decisions: what happens first, in what order do the steps occur, what must be resolved at the beginning for the work to emerge? This is not a metaphor for weaving, but a literal description of the process. The word algorithm predates all machines, and it names exactly what happens here: translating an intention into matter through a series of instructions. Weaving is neither narrated nor improvised; it is programmed.

In some pieces, weaving carries a message: it points outward, toward a code that must be read. In Sebastian Clough-Grahame's Code Meditations, the name of a disappeared person is encrypted, sign by sign, into the weft, and absence becomes an abstract image.

In Vicente Rojo's tapestry, the letter T — a synthesis of a triangle — explores how a minimal element generates a complex visual system. Sebastián Córdova encodes the consequence of a journey that never took place, a speculation inscribed into the structure of the weave. Daniela Libertad's work, on the other hand, reverses the system: it interweaves two different drawings — one in the weft, another in the warp — until neither is fully legible. Encoding in order to hide. In other pieces, weaving functions as a constructive process, giving form its emergence. Camelia Ramos's rebozo resolves its mottled pattern knot by knot before dyeing, so that the pattern exists as an operation before it exists as an image. In Jimena Schlaepfer's paper pieces, the relief comes solely from structure. Andrea Sotelo reclaims tapestry as a Mexican tradition and weaves into it pre-Columbian symbols in dialogue with the present. And Carolina Vélez Muñiz's work takes this logic to its conclusion: revealing the loom as the first computer and evidence, in her words, of the "rhythms and numbers that repeat when weaving."

What changes from one work to another — regardless of material and technique — is what is decided to be encoded — a name, a symbol, a structure, a negation, a journey — but the mechanism remains constant: the object is the deferred result of an order that precedes it. Algoritmo proposes that textiles have always been this: a language of instructions where the weft and warp obey a logic that comes before themselves. To look at the finished work is to read backward the calculation that made it possible.

Artists: Andrea Sotelo, Daniela Libertad, Sebastian Claugh, Jimena Schlaepfer, Carolina Vélez Muñiz, Vicente Rojo, Camelia Ramos y Sebastián Córdova.

—Solar Tacubaya