Renata
Prunas
Biography
She made her debut in the early 1970s with works close to arte povera and conceptual art. From the following decade she participated in women’s groups and exhibitions, a generation that expressed themselves artistically with thread and sewing. Her medium of choice is pantyhose: the nylon veils, knotted, sewn, torn, cut, overlapping, form bizarre geometries and reveal a feminine lexicon and a deep sense of pain, stopped by the knots that shape the shape with multiple plastic possibilities – visuals.
Critical text
“The Sardo-Neapolitan author Renata Prunas does not identify herself as an artist by definition. The key piece of art Campionario (1979) shows the multiple plastic-visual possibilities of a material that Prunas makes her medium of choice:
nylon tights, an industrial product and an everyday life item at the same time. Campionario consists of 20 wooden frames of 35×25 centimeters kept inside a wooden box, where each frame shows nylon veils that have been knotted, sewn, torn, left intact, cut, inverted, overlaid, stretched, or left shapeless from using themThese veils form bizarre geometric shapes, given by the fibre mesh rhythm. They reveal representations of egg cells, stunned breasts, umbilical cords, braids as an ex voto, baby birth ribbons, placentas, twisted bowels, and oculi. Each frame, extracted from the darkness of the box, emerges from a condition of a chthonic, uterine darkness. As in a maieutic operation, the frame offers itself to a reading by coming to light, like the reading of a slide. The image, crossed with light, shows a motif composed of a dense grid of nylon threads as if it was carved. The shapes, which belong to a familiarly feminine lexicon, reveal a deep sense of pain, restrained and stopped by the knots that mould the nylon tights shape.”
_Federica Maria Itria Scano
