Crypton and Designtex have teamed up to introduce a special collection that pays homage to art, design, technology, performance, and two leaders in the contract textile industry. Designtex 5×5, A Crypton Collection features five contemporary artists from around the world, whose work is translated into five patterns in five colorways each, digitally printed onto Crypton-backed upholstery textiles to celebrate 25 years of fabric solutions.
Crypton® is an intelligent, engineered fabric system offering permanent stain and odor resistance plus an integrated moisture barrier.
Designtex commissioned the five artists and expanded their works into five colorways each to complete the collection. The 25 colorways are then digitally printed onto Crypton-backed upholstery textiles at Designtex’s state-of-the-art digital printing facility in Portland, Maine using a cutting edge digital printing process that insures a clarity of image and color. The featured artists include: Arturo Guerrero (Line Variations), Elizabeth Atterbury (Social Dance), Ellie Malin (Five Cities), Kapitza (CrissCross), and Phillip David Stearns (BitDrift).
The initial collection of Crypton textiles that was introduced 25 years ago was cutting edge and paved the way for the performance fabric category, allowing decorative fabrics to be placed in high-use applications. In that spirit, this new collection offers a boundless look towards the future, utilizing Designtex’s technical breakthroughs in print technology, with limitless scale and colors.
Designtex 5×5, A Crypton Collection pays homage to the power that art and design have on a space, a mood, and even the healing process. To emphasize that power, Designtex and Crypton are partnering with RxArt, a non-profit organization whose mission is to help children heal through the extraordinary power of visual art. A portion of the proceeds will benefit this cause.
Created through parametric computation and cellular automata, BitDrift 3958 is sourced from sections of a photograph whose pixels have been algorithmically sorted and shuffled to generate a wholly unique composition that vacillates between order and entropy.
Informed by a wide range of references, from abstraction to natural forms, the studio’s distinct, vibrant aesthetic makes use of a wide color spectrum in CrissCross 3959, featuring a syncopated, striped pattern in five colorways: Gravel, Blossom, Meadow, Sky, and Earth.
Five Cities 3960 combines tonal planes and overlaid cutout shapes that together form a playful, abstract composition with a layered and dimensional depth. Line Variations 3961 features warm overlapping fields of earth tones and cool indigo blue. Social Dance 3962 grew out of a series of monoprints with Wingate Studio, from which the artist has reconfigured plates of abstract colorforms to create a wholly new composition.