Antònia Gallardo, TO, fashion designer by profession, uses thread in painting by stringing the entrepreneurial needle imposed by her profession. The fabric, then, as a professional background, becomes the base element of her collages. With these pieces and with the anarchic work that the art of painting gives her, she contradicts the rules of sewing. The result is a vital and free work, which is claimed with the force and the poetics of simplicity mixed with the freshness of spontaneity and desire to create.

In these works, each thread vibrates, lives and coexists in a particular combination of elements, a swarm of textile strokes that flow over the white paper, around a piece of printed fabric. And it is precisely that industrially coloured strip from which begins the flow of the hazardous composition, which she accomplishes with traces of paint, patches of pure colours combined with tension, chaos and balance.

The artist's courageous containment should be pointed out in these compositions, a rigor that confers sobriety and lightness to the work and that reminds one of the style of the painter Liubov Popova –also a textile designer–, one of the main artists of the Russian avant-gardes.

With Suprematism, Popova looked for a reconstruction of the form done only from colour: with lived geometric compositions, very colourful, that invaded the space in the way of a pictorial architecture. And this is the experience that To performs with fabric, in a, shall we say, so interesting naïve Suprematism.

Ester Xargay, “Threads in painting and fragments in texture”