DECONSTRUCTION AND RE-WEAVING IN THE CONTEMPORARY TAPESTRY OF JOHN PAUL MORABITO
| by Barbara Pavan |
The artistic practice of John Paul Morabito revolutionizes the language of tapestry, reinterpreting it as a medium through which to interrogate the relationship between the sacred, materiality, and the contemporary imaginary. Their approach is one of conscious balance between devotion and disobedience: Morabito draws on the textile tradition in order to overturn its symbolic hierarchies, redirecting the dimension of the sacred into a deeply queer cosmology.
The materials that make up their works – cotton, wool, linen, synthetic gold, and glass beads – oscillate between preciousness and artificiality, giving shape to reflections in which the categories of the authentic and the artificial are continuously negotiated. From this tension emerge works that resist any fixed interpretative closure, instead favouring a condition of instability and semantic openness.
John Paul Morabito approaches tapestry as a space in which image, matter, and body enter into a conflictual relationship, generating form through friction and layering.
The reference to drag plays a central role: understood not only as an aesthetic but as a structuring sensibility, it becomes a tool through which the artist rereads and simultaneously destabilizes narratives linked to faith, history, and cultural inheritance. The practice thus unfolds as an improvisational and manual process, through which ritual objects, relics, and iconic images are transposed into complex textile works, charged with symbolic density and capable of altering the linear perception of time.
John Paul Morabito’s works resist the logic of chrononormativity, situating themselves within a non-linear and shifting queer temporality. In this suspension of the present, Morabito orients their practice toward a horizon that holds together past and future, opening a space of coexistence between memory, desire, and possibilities still in the making.
FULL ARTICLE IS INCLUDED IN ATLAS – CHAPTER ONE, AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE AT WWW.AL3VIEATC.COM/SHOP/ATLAS-CAPITOLO-UNO/ OR BY CLICKING ON THE COVER
