Trace and Repeat the Painting by Juan Manuel Gomez

Juan Manuel Gomez (COL), with his Trace and Repeat the Painting,leads us to reflect on the journey of a contemporary item of clothing. The artist has made paintings on denim fabrics coming from Italian factories, fabrics he made travel – accompanied by a series of instructions on how to work on them – to the places where the big companies send their items of clothing to be finished. The instructions asked to add elements and patches, to do stitchings similar to embroideries, to bleach the fabric; these operations are the language Juan Manuel has chosen to mark the passage of his paintings through the different places – Medellín in Colombia, Dhaka in Bangladesh and Stuttgart in Germany, in a process manually performed by a total of ten people, to then come back to Italy where he himself finished the painted textiles. The canvases represent a travel log of the fabrics, where different hands leave traces of the different places their paths have crossed. The 3 parts, which had travel independently, have been integrated to create one unique piece, representing the circularity in the textile industry and how each step in the making of garments can have a powerful visual action repetition.The work was created in the context of the CIRCULART project where manufacturing companies, fashion designers and artists together with Cittadellarte-Fondazione Pistoletto demonstrate how, through the careful choice of responsible materials and supply chains , new forms of productive and design balance can be explored.