The razor's edge is a fine metaphor to employ when discussing Monique Luchetti's latest work. Sure, this image could seem like a gimmicky pun, because Luchetti cuts up and recomposes braided rugs and industrial carpet in order to bypass modernist painting techniques.  But her work also succeeds in extending that movement's formal, aesthetic and visionary territories while sending up its masculine hegemony. The razor's edge conjures the impossibility of landing on either side of logic's argument, refusing credence to dualities of any kind and sends her ideas into the worlds of physics, eastern philosophy and Nature.  Thus poised, Luchetti's work - somewhat defiantly – offers sensibility and a restrained emotion - which is just how she wants it to exist.

Okay - Luchetti does rearrange used, collectible rugs that she's purchased on ebay and appropriate each one as a foundation on which to rebuild a new composition, subsequently moving that transformed object onto the wall.  What results, however, is not an exploration of the traditional figure/ground relationship or of flatness, but rather an inlaid, tactile - synaesthetic, Venn diagram of a method to accord meaning to the undervalued.  Eye-popping; hummy; vibrating; doodly; and somehow, downright cozy, the eccentric graphic display and comforting repetitions she employs combine with colors ranging from comic-book blue to heel-worn umbers, building up a literal fabric of textures and ropey physicalities, knots and terrains, voids of low-plush nap.  Occasionally, painted washes as applied to canvas or carpet disks are inserted: these invoke planets and Petri dishes.  Misshapen yellow ovoids could be yolks, rik-rak could be scilliae.  Transplanted and off-kilter stripes from a sliced-out circle of a sister rug or from the substructure rug invite the gaze to shift reveries from microcosm to macrocosm, as in Nest, 2004. 

A proficient dispatch of spatial eye play, Tablecloths and Trousers, 2004, is also a cooler abstraction, titled to reference the Whitney's 2002-03 exhibition, The Quilts of Gee's Bend.  Luchetti credits the quilts and information about the lives of the women who made them as inspiration for an essential transition in the focus of her work.  She had been thinking of working with braided rugs for a long time before the Gee's Bend show, because of their place in her own past and their connection to home life and women's work.  Already taken with undermining testosterone-induced notions of the exclusivity of intellect, genius and talent and with aligning herself with “a female level of working”2 and everyday domestic life, Luchetti takes the plunge.  She drops realistic imagery from her vocabulary and emphasizes appropriation, materials and craftsiness.  In Tablecloths, she riffs the Gee's Bend women's use of discarded fabrics necessitated by poverty (the white bands of braid in Tablecloths are scraps from the ragpicker's) and pushes the women's bravura sense of pattern and composition to a next level of abstraction, balancing the intuitive and the learned.  With a nod to Sonia Delaunay's simultaneist paintings, watercolors and prints, Luchetti counterpoises an echo-like, diagrammatic graphic of bands of inlaid white and color-flecked braid emanating from an off-central source to oppose the rigidity of the foundation rug's concentric bands.  The visual tension between these two wave patterns (as in sine and co-sine, wave and trough), couples with the actual physical depth of the right-angled corner presentation to make the piece a quasi-sculptural hybrid of two- and three-dimensional drawing.  The white braid's cragginess is “natural”, and is based on an obsessive doodle Luchetti has been sketching and painting for years.  Delaunay and Louise Bourgeois - another heroine of Luchetti's – often employ the same doodle of the sliced and skewed arc or flower bud in their work.

 Luchetti's work, with its implicit possibility of eternal shuffling and reshuffling of matter, suggests that while simultaneity can be expressed through color and structure, successive histories and uses of materials will further expand meaning and time.  What's more, she has thoroughly pushed her project beyond the mere mechanics of composition and construction and transformed the emotionally laden object that is the appropriated rug into a new chapter of existence. 

Of course, The Razor's Edge, is also the title of a well-known book by W. Somerset Maugham, first published in 1944.  To avoid beating the chosen metaphor into a dead horse, let it suffice to say that Maugham's book and its central themes of renunciation and enlightenment function well in relation to Luchetti's work.  In her practice, once the foundation rug has been sliced, a transgression of sentiment has occurred.  As rebuilt, a balancing act among the components of each composition maintains an equality, erasing all original discreet, operable identities.   

Whether Luchetti ascribes redemptive powers to artmaking or to the experience of viewing her work is up for grabs.  But there is something so adamantine in her initial act of chopping up such pliant, humble symbols of domestic peace and contentment.  Of great interest will be how this intent will be applied to her next body of work.