Armel Barraud, a young artist from beyond the Alps, has responded, as have other exponents of contemporary art, to the call for a return craftsmanship. In recent years, in fact, a trend reversal is taking place in the contemporary art scene. Artists are breaking away from the minimalist and conceptualist current, favoring instead the recovery of craft techniques, which is leading them toward a rediscovery of manual modes of execution.

For the construction of his poetic message, Armel chooses the technique of bobbin lace, releasing this ancient art from a use linked to a purely domestic sphere, giving it all the dignity of an artistic language. Resorting to embroidery, as a mode of expression, means opting for a fin-de-siècle aesthetic solution, decorativism, a bitter enemy of "less is more" and therefore an ideal ally to counter the chastened minimalist severities.

The sterile wall surfaces that Armel adorns by weaving textures of precious metallic threads are transformed into voluptuous parietal embroideries. Geometric and floral decorative motifs form the background to a world populated by animal and mythological creatures reduced, stylized, synthesized, transformed into symbols capable of evoking mythical, fairy-tale dimensions. Animals from medieval bestiaries, Pre-Raphaelite ladies, characters who seem to come from a distant past, but who incredibly speak the same language as man in the contemporary era, because they are "techno-electronic" in their essence, as they are made up of a dense network structure reminiscent of the framework of the Guttembergian "global village."