Nadine Altmayer

"I work on textile as the support of a questioning focused on the theme of “Composing-Disintegrating- Recomposing” thus refusing the limitation of the textile expression to one single technique or medium. 

Whether it be weaved or shaped with reused material, the constructed canvas is a surface which is heavy with materials, textures and volumes, an homogeneous combination defining a source of visual and deep-seated  sensations.

From a methodical and technical practice, which includes the construction of a framework, it is essential for me to dissolve the identity and the initial appearance of the created surface into a long degradation process.  A radical metamorphosis created by a work of reconstruction and restoration then occurs.

Within this accelerated succession, and the narrow relation that my textiles have with wear, tear, trace and memory, I build a place of existence where time awareness and the link with daily use are deleted."

Nadine Altmayer

“Along with cave paintings, threads are among the oldest carriers of meaning” reported Anni Albers in 1965, in her manifesto On Weaving. Myth or true story, the thread is a conductor for Nadine Altmayer, a weaver whose fabrics dyed with acrylic or India ink form piles of secrets. Disjointed and patched, they are covered with clay, liquid earth which stiffens them. The solid state has its advantages: the material must hold together and form a body under the tattered skin, as thin as the border between forgetting and remembering. Worn out and unfinished, it will remain like this, forever in transit, imitating the fossil, the ruin, or even the outline, trapped halfway, ancient and current, on the threshold of its metamorphosis. Everything hangs, crumbles, fades, and yet impresses, as much as a field of excavations or a voodoo doll. It’s because Altmayer has Sioux tricks: armed with a sander, she attacks the agglutinated layers in places. Each of its passages puts them half-naked, and shows or conceals buried treasures - a pinafore dress, a nail - remains of other times, gris-gris of other countries. Faced with these pale canvases, landscapes of snow, or wrinkled cadasters, we remember the satellite views of Babylon or Palmyra, lost cities with an eternal aura. Further on, near charred totems, exposed beams covered with lace, resonating the sad songs of sacred rituals. The hypothesis is plausible but the author defends it. Perhaps its meshes all maintain links, narrow or loose, with an interior disorder. Maybe it’s nothing. What is going on, deep down, belongs to her: the scars are visible but do not concern anyone. Lately, her volumes are getting lighter. Relieved of the weight of the world, they arise as they are, open to the four winds. Here, the metal marks brown, red, or silver curls. Elsewhere, nets without fish are adorned with lead beads. Altmayer plays a game of textures. Also, its grids are full of voids and levels of interpretation.

Virginie Huet