In presenting the triptych of The Annunciation with St. Margaret and St. Ansanus by Simone Martini, the scholar Gianfranco Contini, confessed his desire to secretly extract from the rich and lush composition of that painting a piece of the flashy checkered fabric lining the Angel’s mantle. These pages describe Isabella Ducrot’s meeting with that painting. Through the enigmatic edge of the Angel’s garment she reflects on that which is the first material of her work: the cloth.
For many years Isabella Ducrot has painted and composed in many ways fabrics, textiles, Eastern prayer sashes, attempting each time to demonstrate in those textile structures a “breath”, which crosses and enlivens them. Images, memories and reflections that have stayed with her throughout her work as a painter, are here collected as in a freely composed collage. Isabella Ducrot has written in these pages a confession of poetics.
Take any fabric, let it be linen, silk or wool. Stretch it more, against the light and you will be able to see the weft;
the original architecture composed of crossing threads and of voids that represent the first object of inspiration to
Isabella Ducrot. The fundamental intuition of the author is that human beings, in the contrived textiles that they have
created and worn for millennia, haven’t done more than duplicating a structure original to the mind, that persists unaltered for millennia.
IT. Isabella Ducrot (Napoli 1931) da anni ha fatto dello studio e dell’interesse per la storia dei tessuti il centro delle sue opere pittoriche e dei suoi scritti. Tra i suoi libri ricordiamo La matassa primordiale (nottetempo, 2008), Text on textile (Sylph Edition, 2012) Suonno (La Conchiglia, 2012), Fallaste corazon (Il Notes Magico, 2012). Presso Quodlibet ha pubblicato La stoffa a quadri (2018), La vita femminile (2021) e I ventidue luoghi dello spirito (2022).
EN. Isabella Ducrot (Naples 1931) has for many years focused her paintings and writings on studying and pursuing her interest in the history of textiles. Her books include La matassa primordiale (nottetempo, 2008), Text on Textile (Sylph Editions, 2008), Suonno (La Conchiglia, 2012), and Fallaste corazon (Il Notes Magico, 2012). For Quodlibet, she has written The Checkered Cloth (2019), Women’s Life (2021) and Twenty-Two Places of the Soul (2022).
