Mise-en-carte (Point-paper) 1760 - 1790

This 'Mise-en-carte' or 'Point-paper' is a design for woven textile, likely made by Veret as a guide for a Jacquard loom operator, with gouache and graphite on laid paper. The grid structure, the underlying architecture of the piece, isn't just a background. Each square corresponds to a lift of the loom’s harness. This system allowed for incredibly complex patterns to be mechanized, and produced at scale. Look closely, and you’ll see that the floral design is also built up from small units. It’s almost pixelated. That’s because the artist knew that the design would ultimately be rendered through the binary logic of the loom: thread up, or thread down. This drawing then, is not just a beautiful floral study, it is a visualization of the labor involved in its creation. It prompts us to think about the many hands, and complex calculations required to produce even a single length of patterned cloth, blurring the lines between art, craft, and industry.