André approaches ornamental exaggeration without guilt: his objects are ingeniously decorative, and the volutes, rosettes, lace, and cutouts that populate their surfaces are more enthusiastic participants in a mutating genetic code than emblems of capricious affectation. Filigree becomes a constructive matrix. Pictorial forms nestle within literal formats. A upholstered object is printed with bird designs, numbers, letters, and abstract graphics. The shapes of each object are elementary: except for the two-dimensional "tapestries," almost all these "cushions" are twists of a letter C: the combinatorial heroine of the exhibition.

With a simple right turn, the outlines of the letter C become a pair of arched legs or a pair of shorts, as André likes to call them. These contours end up clustering into an alphabetic typology, as if each of these anonymous things were the minimum component of a larger sequence. Each piece suggests analogies with all the others. A glyph, hence a word, then a sentence, finally an ideogram – a condensation of image and letter. The game is simple and effective: by stretching a certain portion of the segment or by creating an unusual right angle instead of an organic curve, the forms suddenly release allusions: a buoy, a boat, a life jacket, a gate, a lock.

But with André, there is no innocence about the means of expression. Each work is meticulously constructed. The dyed fabric, the cutout with more or less figurative contours – some are supports for smaller pieces of fabric themselves – in an overlay that makes the forms seem to negotiate their legibility with the material. Filling this series of hermetic letters with floral motifs, birds, and all kinds of visual information produces a tingling of vision. Filling such "literal" shapes with this profusion of colors and heterogeneous textures gives rise to a clear formal problem: the constitutive disparity between the specificity of the object and the richness of the internal relations of the ornament. In André's work, this problem is called surface tension.

"Tension" in a painting is an institution taken for granted. Every painting is a canvas stretched on a frame, that's fine. As Robert Morris wrote: "objects that do not project tension clearly declare their separation from the human." Morris's concern was the creation of a unitary sculpture that did not "project tension" and thus would rid itself of all anthropomorphic or zoomorphic relationships, of any "intimacy" with the viewer. I would say that objects that do not project malleability or softness have the same effect: appearing inflated, upholstered, stuffed, or swollen means adhering to the tensile quality of organic bodies, to the inherent plasticity of living forms. This is where the surface tension of each work places them between the alphabet and the organism. In "Seven Flowers" (2023), for example, the outline of the letter, resulting from the restraint of the filling by the fabric membrane, as well as the unrestricted ornamentation, externalize a range of internal relationships, and the shape is maintained from its filling. Things are their skins.

Resorting to such a sensual-sensory dimension is to insist that ornamentation is not alienated from the object that supports it, that it is not equated with extrinsic virtuosity but something that is achieved after much chewing. This chewing, for André (I think), is sewing. A viewer unravels meanings from a series of perceptual oppositions, between ornamented surface and three-dimensional body, between the color of dyed fabric and the color of sewn fabric, for example. In a fusion of tactile and optical perception, he or she follows with the eyes the trail left by the sewing machine. Sewing is not the same as drawing. With sewing, the line cannot wander freely but must play a structuring role and prevent the cotton – the innards of the cushion – from escaping its skin. It is the sewing that produces complicity between fabric scraps that leads to the appearance of an image – a flower, a bird flying, the letter S, and the number 2.

In flat works like "Komorebi" (2023) or "Dive of the Birds" (2023), there is the application of cutouts and their negatives, in laminated layers over each other. Seeing these works is also looking for fits, corresponding relationships between heterogeneous elements, no longer the indecision between inside and outside that occurs in three-dimensional works. The first, whose title refers to the Japanese word for the rays refracted by tree canopies, plays with light and shadow in mutual alternation. This activity seems to embrace André's bucolic repertoire of images; we seek a principle that makes a collection of forms a pattern, as if searching for the underlying structure of nature's species and the natural signs that appear in the landscape. Occasionally, the entire pattern fluffs up its feathers and forms new arrangements and blooms; parts of a scene end up far away and nest in another piece. At the same time, there is so much proliferation of signs and symbols, types, regularities, and inconsistencies that the so-sandwiched surface may well bathe in a visual noise analogous to the chattering of a parrot.

"Arch with Birds" (2023) is perhaps the culmination of the directions I tried to map above. Its scale and format readily identifiable as a portal produce what I would call, with more enthusiasm than theoretical care, textile architecture. The arch is clearly an "ascending" form and guides the gaze upward while calling the body to cross the void that forms between its lines. There is an undeniable spatial depth that does not depend on the content of the work but on its format. However, the interest here is not in the white to which the door gives access but in the saturated doorframe itself. An ambiguous verticality appears, as the birds take flight within the image as the outline leans from the top and the wall. The work then sits on the boundary between weight and thrust, and seems to float there. This almost-flight, the almost-fall of all three-dimensional works also brings them closer to balloons or inflated bladders, those blown rubber surfaces. All the frills have this stretched skin that betrays some inflammation of what it contains, an agitation behind the cover, the filling that wants to avenge the hollow.

Pedro Köberle