Angelo Filomeno: Online Viewing Room June 2022

Angelo Filomeno’s (b. 1963, Italy, lives and works in New York, NY) precisely stitched scenes first caught the world’s attention at the 52nd Venice Biennale. Since then, he has continued to receive critical acclaim for highly symbolic artworks that incorporate a variety of fabrics and materials — including denim, shantung silk, metallic thread, and gemstones — to create pieces that are both alluring and provocative. Filomeno infuses his embroidery with a deep knowledge of art history. Of particular interest are memento mori — still-life paintings popular in early modern Europe meant to serve as reminders of our mortality and the transience of earthly goods.

In these new and recent works, subjects from the natural world — brilliantly rendered peacocks and marine life, blooming flora — shepherd us between the material and spiritual planes. With their sumptuous colors and lustrous textures, Filomeno’s works delight viewers while highlighting the interdependence of all life.

Bridging the natural and spiritual worlds, Filomeno’s recent series of flowers and plants (all 2021) speak to the healing properties of flora. With their jewel-like rings of concentric threadwork, his Mandhalias like imagery of blooming dahlias to mandalas, those circular, patterned forms seen across various spiritual traditions that invite transcendence through focused contemplation. Elsewhere, the artist highlights the medicinal properties of flowers such as dandelion and chamomile, whose healing aspects are widely recognized. Throughout these works, the beauty of nature nourishes both mind and body.

In this suite of Filomeno’s abstract works from 2019, a delicate filigree of metallic thread suggests a strong link between the earthly and spiritual planes: prayer beads, magnetic fields, and the unseen phenomena of our internal worlds are all evoked with Filomeno’s characteristic beauty, the repetition of linear threadwork echoing the series’ title, Mantra. Here, as throughout Filomeno’s work, peace of mind is granted via a concerted act of looking.