Aquiles Paredes
1984 Peru
Aquiles was ten years old when his family moved to Huamanga, in the Peruvian region of Ayacucho, settling in Santa Ana — the neighborhood now known as the Barrio de los Artesanos. His father kept a small weaving workshop next door to the family home, with some ten looms in constant use.
There Aquiles learned the fundamentals: spinning raw wool into thread, then dyeing it with pigments drawn from the land — cochineal reds, molle and walnut greens — before the true weaving could begin. By sixteen he had shown his first pieces; a few years later, a larger exhibition in Lima would change everything.
In Lima, Aquiles met Máximo Laura, one of Peru’s most celebrated tapestry artists, who invited him into his workshop. In the space of a single week, Laura introduced him to alto relieve — high-relief weaving — pushing his work toward painterly depth, dimension and abstraction.
He returned home transformed, opening his own small workshop with a group of young local weavers — sourcing materials and exhibiting together for several years, until his collaborators dispersed to pursue university studies.
A move to Lima in 2012 sharpened his technique amid commissions for Peru’s provinces. Years in Cusco and then Nazca followed — teaching visiting students, then developing work inspired by Nazca’s iconic desert geometry from 2018 to 2022 — before he settled in Cusco with a studio of his own.
Today Aquiles works across six weaving techniques, fusing ancient Andean methods with contemporary abstraction. He continues to gather and preserve weavings from across Peru’s many regions and cultures, in pursuit of a long-held dream: to one day open a museum dedicated entirely to the art of the loom.
