Admiring the work of a creator can lead to the desire to step on it. Or lie down as long as you can on it. It happens with rugs with a strong personality, signed by cult authors in the current design scene. Evolved reproduction techniques provide great fidelity to the original. Although also, the patient task of the human eye comparing colors. Whether from a small pencil drawing, a broad brushstroke of tempera or 3D-generated motifs, the textile canvas comes to a warm life.
The dreamlike, somewhat crazy and festive universe of Jaime Hayón, the most international of Spanish designers, is transferred to the Troupe rug. Woven with New Zealand sheep’s wool, it reflects his unique graphic traits. The Barcelona rug publisher Nanimarquina received from Hayón a drawing painted with colored pencils, DIN A4 size, and vectorized it to work on it to a greater extent. “We start with a bitmap –they explain to Magazine Lifestyle from Nanimarquina–, that is, a digital document that allows us to map the drawing. The master craftsmen who make the rug manually print it on a real scale and follow the drawing to be 100% faithful to the original”.
They approach the chromatic with a very extensive palette of wool knobs, which they compare through prototypes until they refine the tone. For Hayon, color is all about balance. “It’s like cooking. You have to put the right amount every time. So when you do a composition, it needs air and it needs color balance. It’s all a matter of balance in the end.” Her rug speaks of friends, children, free spirit and spontaneity. Animals of different nature and dimension floating in space that do not know boredom.
The hypnotic luminosity of the Opticks rug, created by the Valencian Ovidi Benet, was achieved after the study and digital analysis of the colorimetry of the Great Prismatic Fountain of Yellowstone, USA, extracting 37 different colors and their transitions, armed by means of gradients. A year and a half of work, trial and error, tones, saturation, contrast and colorimetry. Woven with lyocell (biodegradable fiber made from cellulose wood) and bamboo, the first gives it exceptional shine and the second the touch. A combination that enhances its extreme vividness and light, and the tactile sensation of silk.
According to its author, the carpet is conceived as generating the epicenter in space. And it turns visual epiphanies of the natural world – in this case the spectacular hot springs in Yellowstone National Park, 110 m in diameter where more than 2,000 liters per minute gush out at 70ºC – into an object of domestic design. It is a numbered and serialized piece that can be found at Il·lacions Design Gallery.
Tempera or gouache –a water-based painting technique, although with a higher concentration of pigment than watercolor– has been chosen by the Frenchman Arthur Ristor to design the Get Around: Cosme rug. In the elaboration of the original, with a size of 15 x 25 cm, he also added colored pencils. “The small format makes it easier for me to be more expressive in the line, directly following the movement of the wrist,” Ristor clarifies to Lifestyle Magazine.
The flat areas and the play of volumes make it possible to reproduce the materiality of the gouache that is deposited on the colored pencils or the lines of pencils that cross the gouache, spreading and modifying the crossed color”. In the translation to the carpet, the brushwork is highlighted by the carving of the pile at different heights. And the palette of 1,200 wool colors from the Italian rug publisher Nodus contributes to a precise color match.
Ristor explains that the name of the Cosme rug is a contraction of the word cosmopolitan. And the series is inspired by the movements of cities and the dynamics linked to the crowd and passers-by. “People walk, talk, laugh, shout, walk, look around, meet or ignore each other. This rug translates and pays homage to this richness, this mix of people and genres, an expression of life frozen in a snapshot.”
The digital and surreal universe of Ada Sokol, generated with 3D technology, has ended up being displayed on rugs. She interprets the Extinct Animals collection of the Dutch furniture firm Moooi with three specimens: Mimic Moth, Queen Cobra and Golden Tiger. And if at the last fair in Milan they were presented as pieces of animated art to introduce into our homes, proposing a coexistence between the physical and digital worlds, now they have been transferred to wool. They do, however, retain the mixture of fantasy and realism that presides over Sokol’s style. A dream world that mixes nature with mythical gadgets and seeks to evoke an ultrasensory experience. The futuristic and sensual settings of the Polish designer are captured using an advanced technique of printing on wool.