Lacis

A fragment of an aged face, painted in reddish-brown tones, hints at an eye with pronounced eyelashes and a piercing gaze: the dense, textured paint meticulously captures the skin’s texture and the folds surrounding it. Surrounding this fragment, a profuse white embroidery unfurls its volutes and interlacing patterns like a true ornamental net, a lacis, that tight network of knotted or interwoven threads which, historically, served to adorn and reinforce the fabric. Here, the thread’s arabesques encircle the painted eye on all sides, almost to the point of engulfing it, like a protective mesh or a web of memory woven around the gaze. Lacis thus explores this vice-like grip between the painted flesh and the textile ornament: the face seems both held in place and magnified by this network of threads, caught in the mesh of a heritage that envelops and preserves it just as much as it threatens to cover it entirely.