If the body is our first way of inhabiting the world, hands are how that territory opens, touches, and transforms it.
Perhaps the hand is the body's most precise language. It creates, expresses, touches, protects, offers, draws near. Through it, we turn thought into matter and intention into gesture. Before it is a tool, the hand is a symbol: of creation, of affection, of desire, of expression.
In Gesto, Paola Vilas draws on this ancestral language to investigate the symbolism of hands and their relationship to the feminine body. Small wearable sculptures are built in 18k gold, emeralds, diamonds, and pearls, reproducing hands as fragments of a body that become objects of adornment, talismans, extensions of the skin itself.
The collection continues Paola's investigation of the feminine body as territory: a place of experience, memory, expression, and transformation.
In Gesto, the body is not merely a support for the jewel; it takes part in the work, completing its meanings through the particular way each piece is worn.
There is also a fundamental tension between the scale of the sculptures and the complexity of their execution. The hands are reduced to near-microscopic dimensions without losing their anatomy. The collection turns delicacy into a technical challenge: preserving, at the smallest scale, what normally belongs to the grand scale of sculpture — making the very construction of the jewel an investigation into the limits of making.
On these small sculptures, emeralds, diamonds, and pearls appear as precious elements — not merely as ornament, but as points of intensity within the composition.
Gesto proposes no single way of wearing the jewel. On the contrary, it is born to be composed. The hands can meet, overlap, multiply across the body. They can be combined with one another, mixed, layered, or worn alone. The collection sets no final image: it offers elements for each person to build their own.
In this sense, to wear Gesto is also to make a gesture.
The jewel ceases to be a finished object and comes to exist in relation to the one who wears it. It becomes a small choreography upon the body, a sculpture in motion, a particular language built between hands, skin, and matter.
