Eight years ago, painter Paolo Arao was invited to be a visiting artist with the Fibers and Materials Studies program at Philadelphia’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture. A curator there prompted Arao to transform three of his paintings into a tapestry using a digital Jacquard loom, which can take images uploaded from a computer and turn them into textile art. “It completely changed the trajectory of my work,” Arao says. “It was this fascinating moment where, in my bones, I felt like I should have been working with textiles all along.” Arao has been creating tapestries ever since, and a dozen of his works were recently part of a solo exhibition, Devotion, at the David B. Smith Gallery in Denver.
Étude (Breakers), 2024, hand-stitched cotton thread, pieced + sewn cotton + denim, hand-woven cotton, wood frame. 12 x 9 inches. (Photo by: Chromatics Studio NYC.)
While researching for Devotion, Arao (who was born in the Philippines) learned that Indigenous Filipino cloth patterns were individually designed to offer spiritual protection to whomever is holding or wearing the textile. Each work in the Devotion series depicts one of Arao’s friends or family members, complete with characterizations of the subject’s personality. Étude (Mandarin) represents Arao’s husband, whose favorite color is orange. “Years ago, he made this comment about why I never used orange in my paintings, and he was absolutely right,” Arao says. “After that, I started introducing orange into everything that I made, even if it was just a little speck of orange hidden somewhere, because it’s like, I’m doing this for you.” As Arao constructed these portraits during the winter, hand-stitching by the light of his fireplace, the name of the exhibition became clear to him. “There’s so much happening inside each of these works, an immense world encapsulated on such an intimate scale,” he says. “Making something by hand requires patience and love and care, and I wanted to put all of that into these pieces. It became a devotional act.”
