EYE ON ART | Arts and Crafts by Paula Sanz Caballero

by Roberta Busnelli

'My work is on sensuality. It is the sensual potential of illustration that attracts me. This call is even stronger when I observe drawings or paintings done by others. I am struck by the sensual rhythm of the pencil or the brushstrokes. It is a physical sensation I have had since I was a little girl, when visiting museums. All I could do then was to reproduce the movement, the rhythm of the brush strokes and the composition with my hands and arms. The sensuality of movement is something that cannot be seen, strictly speaking, but that is there in the best works. You can sometimes find it in the clouds or hidden in disparate places and forms. Wherever I find it, I once again try to draw it in my mind with my hands and arms to try to understand it and enjoy it. If there is a place where this is most evident to me, it is the human body. That’s why drawing people is my greatest pleasure. There is another aspect that attracts me to drawing and painting—the chance to communicate without words, which for me are much more tiring than the language of forms.' —Paula Sanz Caballero

Born under the sun of the Valencian province, with four generations of dyers and textile printers behind her, Paula Sanz Caballero has never had any doubts. Ever since she was a child, she has known what destiny had in store for her. Turning her hand to art, in any shape and form. ‘I've always felt like an artist, and I’ve never dreamed of being anything else.’ After a degree in Fine Arts and a Master’s in Graphic Design at the University of Valencia, she began her career at the age of 20, as an oil painter to be exact, looking up to classical masters such as Velásquez, Veronese, Manet. On a flight to Toronto, without a pencil, book or any company, she picked up a piece of fabric and a sewing kit and began to compose her first work, a naked man. For Sanz Caballero it was an epiphany: ‘I loved it,’ she recalls, ‘it was relaxing and therapeutic, I thought I’d found an interesting way to express my world.’ And so, she abandoned painting for a unique mix of crafting and illustration. With needle and thread, scissors and offcuts, pencil and ink, she wanted to create art and design. This time, her historical mentor was René Gruau, the guru of fashion illustration in the 1940s and 1950s.

In the 1990s, in a world on the verge of going digital, her work kit and the creative flair of her hands burst like a tsunami into international fashion magazines—Elle, Vogue, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan—prestigious newspapers—The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, El Mundo, El País, San Francisco Chronicle, la Repubblica—into the department stores of Bloomingdale’s, Neiman Marcus, Ann Taylor, and into art galleries in London, Barcelona, Madrid and Chicago. Her hand-embroidered illustrations sold like hot cakes.

Sanz Caballero tells stories and makes art; fashion is only one of the possible subjects. ‘The need to tell a story,’ she says, ‘comes before any consideration on looks or clothes. I use clothes, textures and colours to explain the mood of my characters, rather than using personalities to show off fashion trends. I simply have to love the story behind my embroidery work.’ And this is what sets apart her creations and her technique, which has evolved from figurative painting to embroidery, giving life to drawings full of irony, tortuous relationships, crimes and female revenge.

Sanz Caballero undoubtedly has the merit and virtue of having legitimised a craft relegated to the home and considered for the most part a harmless, female pastime. ‘To me, feminine means silence, mystery, discreet elegance and that particular attitude of being close and distant at the same time. My greatest success is having brought the use of materials and techniques traditionally linked to “grandmothers” into the fashion world.’ Although Sanz Caballero sets her retro-inspired narratives in the elegant and sophisticated world of high society, her figurative style full of ironic details takes the edge off the cold, frivolous glamour. ‘In portraying the characters who inhabit this world,’ she continues, ‘I also add a lot of irony, black humour and disturbing details that allude to deeper meanings, lying beneath the sophisticated surface.’

A lover of beautiful style and things made by hand, slowly and well, out of patient labour and sophisticated technical skill, Sanz Caballero works with her fingers and a pencil within the slow-paced time of embroidery. It is her stylistic identity but also a way to reclaim, with a modern language, the ancient tradition of Arts and Crafts, that knowledge made of hands, precision and a love for beauty. ‘I grew up dreaming of being an apprentice in a Renaissance guild,’ she says. ‘I have always been attracted to things done with love, patience, reflection. The challenge for me is to transmit energy and body movement with minimal elements. It is the harmony of the gestures that generates the vitality and beauty of the composition.’

Who knows what the fate of craftsmanship will be when the metaverse, already a key playing field, becomes the main stage for future fashion and art. We shall prepare our avatars to wear and exhibit ‘virtual artefacts’ for digital, professional or social occasions. Metaverses and NFTs vs. arts and crafts, a virtual game becoming all too real?