Through his work, Laikblua generates dialogues between craft, gender and language. In his quest to bring back former feminine activities towards inclusive work, he transforms images with almost pictoric gestural eruptions.
His proposal is to inhabit photographs with threads, where the stitches complete the sensorial weft of the intervened scene.
The artist exalts through braille what is not said on the surface, being some sort of translator of the invisible into the sensorial, transforming the visual experience into a tactile instrument and thus bringing a new communicative dimension to the work.
Laikblua's works contain two languages, visual and tactile, engaging the viewer to enter a sphere hardly known to a generation where the visual has monopolised the senses. We can feel the image and at the same time lose ourselves in its embroidered narrative.
The exploration of personal, historical and family memory through his photo-embroidery never fails to amaze with its unlimited ability to delicately contrast textures, sensations and materials. His work exudes the need to delicately assemble a mesh that surrounds his characters, somehow protecting them and becoming their interpreter. We are before an artist emotionally involved with each image, creating new narratives with his intervention.
"In the search for a language, I opened myself up to the question of how to (re)inhabit an image, how to reinterpret the gaze one had at the moment of taking that photograph and how, from this, new universes open up. This is how my path in photo-embroidery began, combining two disciplines that can coexist in the same space”
Laikblua (Alejandro Osses) ,1990 Santiago de Chile.
Art has always been a passion that has led him to experiment with different forms of expression such as design and theatre. In the latter discipline he had the opportunity to participate in the theatrical project called "funciones distendidas" (2018) at the GAM centre in Santiago de Chile. These performances, where the theatre is adapted for people with disabilities, showed Osses that tactile stimulation is one of the least explored senses in the art world. This revelation became the starting point to begin embroidering in braille.
"Embroidering in braille then became my way of bringing textile art to blind people, experimenting not only with texts in braille but also with different textures that stimulate the tactile".
His experience in the technique of embroidery on photo, using braille and other textures, allowed him to be part of the permanent staff of workshop leaders in an important institution of higher education in Santiago de Chile. In this workshop he shares his techniques and the necessary skills so that other people can get into artistic embroidery and textile art.
Among his influences are embroiderers such as Romi Páez, Petra Heidrich, Han Cao, Natalia Sánchez and Gabriela Martinez; who, through their textural works, have encouraged Laikblua's drive to experiment in the textile area. Within the work of colour, Ricardo Cavolo (illustrator), Karen Barbé (designer and embroiderer) and Wes Anderson (filmmaker) have become references of how the use of colour creates atmospheres. Other influences are the work of Frida Kahlo and Jazmina Barrera which have helped him connect with his inner voice and from it to be able to communicate the emotions and sensations that the photographs trigger in him.
"Throughout my life, however, my greatest influence has been my grandmother. Thanks to her I learned how to work with a needle and thread when I had to mend clothes. This led to my interest in experimentation within the textile world and how to create different textures in materials which I intervened with the help of thread and needle".