The farther Gilbert Bretterbauer advances in his world of texts and textiles, the more evident the timeliness of his work becomes. Textiles were once treated as ornamentation and decoration, but today Bretterbauer’s “textile thinking” (D. Zyman) is omnipresent, a desideratum of versatile, solution-oriented thinking in complex situations of socio- and ecopolitical conflict. It accepts the infinite entanglement and deceptive softness of its material, the ephemeral and fragmentary qualities of its design, the interminability of the processes set in motion. And the perception of these circumstances unravels the flowing, preliminary, ever-undoable and revocable axioms of his thinking and artistic practice. This is how Penelope entangled the rigid mindsets her antagonists in endless delay; and the “small” Lilliputians used their dexterity with needle and thread to transform Gulliver, if ever so briefly, into an amorphous lump. The mindful elegance of these methods of conceptual textile thought is perceived less and less nowadays—but we cannot afford to lose track of their vital importance.
