https://manuolarte.com/manu-olarte 2025-07-23T15:28:41+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/U2358311841968015237483850011303/2-zapatap-bolso.JPG SCROLL DOWN https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/D2358312515477088112693289063079/5.JPG SCROLL DOWN https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/W2358689708541608989796547859111/_DSC3110.jpg SCROLL DOWN https://manuolarte.com/textile-creatures 2025-07-23T15:22:17+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/L2358321753385159297552223736487/4.JPG Handbag Disección textil de un bolso vintage en caja de metacrilato · Caja metacrilato bota: 29 × 25 × 6 cm Madrid, 2025 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/C2358321753348265809404804633255/2.JPG Highway to hell Patchwork textil y metacrilato modelado por calor. · Patchwork / metacrilato 1: 1,25 × 75 × 84 cm Madrid, 2025 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/F2358321753329819065331095081639/1.jpg <div style="text-align: left"> Patchwork and heat-molded methacrylate. Composition of four pieces: · Patchwork / Methacrylate 1: 1.25 × 75 × 84 cm // · Patchwork / Methacrylate 2: 1.12 × 97 × 65 cm · Methacrylate Box “Boot”: 33 × 33 × 8 cm // · Methacrylate Box “Bag”: 29 × 25 × 6 cm TEXTILE CREATURES // 2025 Fashion, beyond its utilitarian function, is a language laden with cultural, emotional, and political meanings. This project claims its artistic dimension through the creation of textile pieces that transcend commercial boundaries and address issues such as identity, memory, finitude, and gender. Inspired by theories from Foucault, Barthes, and Lipovetsky, as well as practices by artists like Mario Espliego and Martin Margiela, the work explores clothing as a corporeal archive: vintage garments—mainly discarded men’s suits—preserving traces of past lives and obsolete power systems. Through techniques of patchwork and deconstruction, “textile creatures” emerge to reveal the hidden: open seams, intervened linings, worn fabrics. The question, “How would you dress if you knew you were going to die today?” guides the process, proposing clothing not as a social disguise, but as a second skin revealing our deepest truth. Thus, the project proposes a deconstruction of gender in clothing, dissolving binary boundaries and questioning the performativity of dressing. Masculine and feminine aspects are merged, undone, and reformulated into hybrid pieces that challenge hierarchies of gender, class, and consumption. Death, understood as a democratizing phenomenon, permeates the entire work: fabrics become textile memento mori that celebrate the imperfect and the ephemeral. In contrast to fast fashion and digital dematerialization, this project offers a tactile and slow approach, where the garments’ scars address the viewer directly. Ultimately, it is not about dressing bodies, but about questioning them. The resulting pieces are sensitive maps of individual and collective memories that celebrate the beauty of fragility, wear, and lived experience. Madrid, 2025 </div> https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/Q2358321753403606041625933288103/5.JPG A boot is a body Disección textil de una bota vintage en caja de metacrilato · Caja metacrilato bota: 33 × 33 × 8 cm Madrid, 2025 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/M2358321753366712553478514184871/3.JPG Braces Patchwork textil y metacrilato modelado por calor. · Patchwork / metacrilato 2: 1,12 × 97 × 65 cm Madrid, 2025 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/Y2358321753422052785699642839719/6.JPG https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/N2358321753440499529773352391335/7.JPG https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/Q2458761200476800249446342759079/_DSC4685.jpg Textile disection Disección textil de un bolso vintage en caja de metacrilato · Caja metacrilato bota: 79 × 34 × 6 cm Madrid, 2025 https://manuolarte.com/beyond-the-void 2025-07-23T15:22:17+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/P2358616068751885115718596203175/6.jpg Patchwork 4 ·Patchwork confeccionado con tejidos mixtos sobre fieltro soporte: 201 x 94 cm Madrid, 2025 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/C2358616068659651395350048445095/1.jpg <div style="text-align: left"> Sculptural installation: Beyond the Void. Textile patchwork on felt base. Composition of five pieces: · Patchwork 3: 167 × 104 × 0.5 cm · Patchwork 4: 201 × 94 × 0.5 cm · Patchwork 1: 167 x 104 × 0,5 cm · Patchwork 4: 201 x 94 × 0,5 cm · Patchwork 4: 152 × 124 × 0,5 cm BEYOND THE VOID // 2024 The project Beyond the Void was born from a deeply personal experience: the premature loss of my father, a sculptor whose life was marked by dedication to art as well as by the frustration of not achieving the recognition he longed for. This painful episode initially led me to reject art as a vocation. However, over time, it inspired a reflection on the social pressures that drive individuals to pursue external ideals of success, often causing alienation and denial of one’s own identity. The work explores the tension between authenticity and conformity, questioning the social norms that dictate how we should be. In this sense, clothing serves as a central metaphor: garments function as a nonverbal language and reflect fragmented identities—layers adopted to fit into various contexts. These masks can distance the individual from their essence, accumulating fictions that conceal true identity. Beyond the Void offers an introspective refuge—a space where social conventions dissolve and reconciliation with one’s own light and shadows becomes possible. The installation comprises two main elements: a fabric made of overlapping, deconstructed garments in patchwork form, symbolizing the multiple roles we assume; and liquid sculptures—abstract resin stains with glossy finishes—that defy rigid standards. This work is intrinsically connected to my love for clothing and its significance. Each used garment is more than just fabric; it represents memory and lived experience. By collecting old garments, especially those laden with history and emotion, I seek to bring together different origins and meanings, constructing pieces that reveal both visible and hidden aspects within ourselves. Beyond the Void celebrates individual uniqueness, using art as a tool to question imposed narratives and to propose a space where fragmented identities might be reconciled toward wholeness. Málaga, 2024.</div> https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/I2358616068714991627571177099943/4.jpg Patchwork 2 ·Patchwork confeccionado con tejidos mixtos sobre fieltro soporte: 196 x 59 cm Madrid, 2025 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/J2358616068770331859792305754791/7.jpg Patchwork 5 ·Patchwork confeccionado con tejidos mixtos sobre fieltro soporte: 181 x 145 cm Madrid, 2025 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/X2358616068696544883497467548327/3.jpg Patchwork 1 ·Patchwork confeccionado con tejidos mixtos sobre fieltro soporte: 33 × 33 × 8 cm Madrid, 2025 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/M2358616068678098139423757996711/2.jpg Beyond the Void Instalación con piezas de patchwork textil. Madrid, 2025 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/V2358616068733438371644886651559/5.jpg Patchwork 3 ·Patchwork confeccionado con tejidos mixtos sobre fieltro soporte: 167 x 104 cm Madrid, 2025 https://manuolarte.com/extended-patterns 2025-07-23T15:22:18+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/H2466568669244912475008926126759/IMG_7126-r.jpg https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/H2466568905584597547375701430951/IMG_7140-r.jpg <div style="text-align: left">Collage made from multiple patterns. Series of 5 collages: · Extended Pattern 1: 160 × 140 cm · Extended Pattern 1: 160 × 140 cm Extended Patterns // 2024 The expanded patterns I present initially emerged as the foundation for the acrylic silhouettes of my textile sculptures, within the textile creatures process. Inspired by the fragmentation and recomposition of garment templates found in magazines like Burda, these hybrid patterns soon ceased to follow the logic of a functional body and acquired a symbolic presence of their own. As the project evolved, the patterns grew and eventually emancipated themselves from the strictly sculptural field, becoming autonomous works —interdependent, yet with singular value. This process resonates both formally and conceptually with Daniel Libeskind’s “impossible plans” for the Jewish Museum in Berlin: as in his architecture, fragmentation, displacement and absence articulate a memory of what is lost and what cannot be represented. Thus, my patterns do not aim for utility or symmetry. Instead, they map hidden relationships, absent bodies and displaced subjectivities, generating a textile spatiality that functions as a sensitive archive. While some still dialogue with the acrylic sculptures —whose structures resemble transparent hangers holding the material memory of multiple lives— I am currently exploring the expanded patterns as independent pieces, capable of containing that emotional Frankenstein: assemblages of memories, gestures and fragments of identity sewn from absence. Each one proposes an impossible surface, like an affective map or architectural plan where the textile speaks both of what is visible and what remains hidden. Madrid, 2024.</div> https://manuolarte.com/50-dibujos 2025-07-23T15:22:18+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/N2466586133386269610273856197287/_DSC4089.jpg https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/R2466586133349376122126437094055/_DSC4087.jpg https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/S2466586133423163098421275300519/_DSC4093.jpg https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/V2466586133275589145831598887591/_DSC4085.jpg <div style="text-align: left">Collection of 50 collages in mixed media. ·Collage and mixed markers on paper: 21 × 29 cm. 50 Drawings // 2024 This series of fifty drawings stems from a persistent image that, rather than a memory, has become a daily presence. The scene comes from Villaverde, in the south of Madrid — a place marked by contrasts: accessible housing, but also areas shaped by vulnerability. There, the figure of young people struggling with drug addiction, particularly affected by fentanyl use, has become a common sight. Bodies frozen in poses that defy logic, suspended in a kind of trance that seems to lift them off the ground, detached from the rhythm of the world. These images, unsettling yet deeply human, triggered in me a need for representation that did not pass through photography. I felt that photographing them would be a form of intrusion, a way of turning their fragility into spectacle. I chose drawing as a medium to approach the scene without invading it — to translate a physical impression into a line, a blot, an obsessive repetition. Each drawing is a variation on the same pose, a suspended gesture, a formal exploration that becomes an attempt at understanding. The repetition of the line does not aim for accuracy, but for resonance — a way of approaching that reality without judgment, of holding the gaze on what we are socially trained to ignore. Through drawing, I find a way to dignify that presence, to make visible what daily life erases or normalizes. What remains is the question of that humanity crouched at the margins, and the desire to look at it with care. Madrid, 2024.</div> https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/E2466586133478503330642403955367/_DSC4096.jpg https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/F2466586133515396818789823058599/_DSC4098.jpg <div style="text-align: left">Collection of 50 collages in mixed media. ·Collage and mixed markers on paper: 21 × 29 cm. 50 Drawings // 2024 This series of fifty drawings stems from a persistent image that, rather than a memory, has become a daily presence. The scene comes from Villaverde, in the south of Madrid — a place marked by contrasts: accessible housing, but also areas shaped by vulnerability. There, the figure of young people struggling with drug addiction, particularly affected by fentanyl use, has become a common sight. Bodies frozen in poses that defy logic, suspended in a kind of trance that seems to lift them off the ground, detached from the rhythm of the world. These images, unsettling yet deeply human, triggered in me a need for representation that did not pass through photography. I felt that photographing them would be a form of intrusion, a way of turning their fragility into spectacle. I chose drawing as a medium to approach the scene without invading it — to translate a physical impression into a line, a blot, an obsessive repetition. Each drawing is a variation on the same pose, a suspended gesture, a formal exploration that becomes an attempt at understanding. The repetition of the line does not aim for accuracy, but for resonance — a way of approaching that reality without judgment, of holding the gaze on what we are socially trained to ignore. Through drawing, I find a way to dignify that presence, to make visible what daily life erases or normalizes. What remains is the question of that humanity crouched at the margins, and the desire to look at it with care. Madrid, 2024.</div> https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/W2466586133496950074716113506983/_DSC4097.jpg https://manuolarte.com/no-one-shouldn't-hidewho-they-truly-are 2025-07-23T15:22:18+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/R2358672916876307061613321949863/No one shouldnt hide who they truly are https://manuolarte.com/who-do-you-dress-for 2025-07-23T15:22:18+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/M2358676046827607768281492394663/¿para quién me visto? https://manuolarte.com/profile 2025-07-23T15:22:18+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/O2358685559573718907339036594855/Foto-retrato-Manu.jpg https://manuolarte.com/middle-nav 2025-07-23T15:32:35+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/X2358286789426441988468090770087/2-zapatap-bolso.JPG https://manuolarte.com/bottom-nav 2025-07-23T15:32:35+00:00 always 0.5 https://manuolarte.com/top-nav-(mobile) 2025-07-23T15:22:18+00:00 always 0.5