A series of tapestries entitled “Sections (The Other Shapes of Me),” 2021, is created through the same process, but using a modern, digital Jacquard loom. The fabric, this time in yellow, green, red, and blue, is exhibited on the wall in vertical fragments that resemble the stripes of a barcode, each as long as the artist is tall. The orderly totality of the sections conveys Vavarella’s genetic makeup, their cumulative visual impact producing a sense of vertigo. The viewer’s gaze succumbs to waves of color and to an undifferentiated mass of information, unable to identify the ordering syntax of the compositions. Interlacing the marvels of technology with his own personal history, Vavarella transforms the codes that define us on a cellular level into a mode of abstract self-portraiture. Its implications, however, far surpass the individual, traversing a continuum that stretches from the organic to the analog to the digital, and perhaps back again.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Veronica Santi