Exhibition "A chair is a chair is a chair"

Typology that consists of horizontal support detached from the floor and supported by feet, so that the legs rest in the sitting position of the body. Chairs and benches have legs that momentarily replace those of humans. Sometimes the chairs have arms, which also provide respite and rest. And they have a back, which is where the word back comes from. Legs, feet, arms, back, seat: the chair is the image of a seated person. The familiarity of the sculptural form makes it an ongoing and fascinating attraction for the artist.

This exhibition features around fifty works – including chairs, armchairs, benches and stools – by 51 contemporary and modern artists. Several of them were made especially for the exhibition and are new. Although most can be used and follow some inescapable structural rules, these artists' creations detach themselves from the demands of design. If the industrial designer typically needs to consider issues such as scale production or ergonomics, artists can spontaneously venture into materials and techniques, commenting on social, political, technological and cultural dynamics.

Archaeological stones show that seats have been with us since the Neolithic era, in the transition from nomadism to the first settlements. It doesn't take much imagination to imagine our ancestors finding support and rest on rocks or tree trunks, as recalled by Amelia Toledo and Edgard de Souza's benches, Marcius Galan's lashings of restless branches, Tiago's palm trunk shape. Master or the tortoise of Makaulaka Mehinaku, in which the animal's contours are suggested by the raw wood.

In Brazil, the popular and anonymous everyday stool – that of construction workers, farm workers, street vendors –, designed with simplicity from found materials, inspires Rivane Neuenschwander, Nicolás Bacal, Keila Alaver, Campana and Mônica Ventura , who created the bank with his father, bricklayer Osvaldo Costa. José Bento transforms his stool into a counter, with elements of a samba circle – cachaça, tambourines – in parallel with the ritualistic function of the apoti on which, in the work of Jaime Lauriano, rests the bowl filled with Portuguese stones.

Marcos Chaves rescued his chair with a back made of market crate slats on a sidewalk in Rio – a ready-made. With other elements found on the street, Alexandre da Cunha and Rafael Triboli create a loveseat that opens up space for a conversation in the dim light. In Between Heaven and Earth, Ernesto Neto makes the pink peroba bench the space for an emotional bond, a romance, framed by the crochet rope that hangs from above. Called Juntos, the bench with an articulated base and a scooter shock absorber, by Iván Argote, requires agreement between its occupants: it works like a seesaw or a park bench to talk, stay, lull, in short, be together.

Benches and chairs can be symbols of hierarchy and power. The term chairman, the president of the company, literally translates as “the man in the chair”. The throne of pharaohs, emperors, kings and tribal chiefs resonates in the chair of Seu Fernando da Ilha do Ferro, its majesty implied by the elevated height of the seat and back. From this pompous matrix come the wide armchairs with arms like the one by Flávio de Carvalho for Fazenda Capuava or the rocking chair by the Mexican Jorge Pardo, carved with an excerpt from the painting L'Atelier du peintre by Courbet.

Rirkrit Tiravanija claims the chair as an instrument of rest and not of work by writing on the back “do not ever work”. The form created by Lucas Simões is in a “state of rest” and is called Dormente, in reference to the Aristotelian concept of power.

An empty chair is the representation of a body that is not there. We see people and characters in Romana by Ana Mazzei, in Silla Castigada by Carlos Bunga and in Arm by Brian Griffiths. Is there a more striking absence than that of the pair of armchairs that Maria Thereza Alves created after the death of her husband, the artist Jimmie Durham (continued life 1800-2022)? Thinking about this distance, Raphaela Melsohn called hers the void fills itself.

There are indications of encounters, as in the interdependence of the bodies of avaf's collaboration with Yuli Yamagata. The triple chair of the Opavivará collective! It is an invitation to social interaction, an allegory of friendship on the beaches of Brazil that recreates the common type of folding chair made of aluminum and nylon fabric, on which Detanico Lain and Rochelle Costi also interacted. Time passes languidly in them: one embroidered with clock hands, the other surrounded by a small plant landscape.

Daniel Albuquerque's furniture is a combination of his primary material, knitting, and futon upholstery. Unrolled, it takes on shapes that range from the chaise to the mat. Sonia Gomes ditto: applies the tactile and sensual media of fabrics, lace, cords and ties to the hard, dry surface of the four-legged wooden stool, the same popular model to which Marepe references. With the characteristic humor that permeates his work, the Bahian artist carved the bench in the shape of a champagne bottle seal.

Efrain Almeida carves goat feet on his chair, and makes the seat with the skin in the style of country culture. Vivian Caccuri unveils a stringed musical instrument from her chair. In the four corners of his Bocada bench, Mano Penalva incorporated crochet holes from a pool table – in which, who knows, you could store an iPhone or small objects. Jarbas Lopes' cardboard bank is filled with old documents, expired contracts, random papers – in reference to the paper money traditionally kept in the bank, the financial institution. A work of art whose name is “you can sit”; that is, sitting on a pile of money.

The benches by Daniel Senise, Gabriel Orozco and Marcelo Pacheco are based on modern language, with details specific to each poetic style; Senise, for example, uses wooden planks removed from a building designed by Franz Heep, from the late 1950s, for the seat.

What artist's studio doesn't have a chair? How many times has it not been central to a work? Edgar Degas portrayed an empty armchair, with its back to the viewer. Van Gogh painted his as a still life, the pipe resting on the braided natural fiber. Joseph Beuys made her ephemeral, out of fat, as did Adriana Varejão, out of dried meat. Joseph Kosuth went from object to representation and concept, in the classic work One and Three Chairs. Andy Warhol's electric chair continues to give you goosebumps, 60 years later.¹

The proposals in this exhibition are a tiny sample of a vast field.² Artists who also made design a profession – such as Abraham Palatnik and Geraldo de Barros – designed at least a dozen seats, a sign of a challenge that never ends (Lygia Clark landed in a famous portrait sitting on Palatnik's chair exhibited here; Barros's chair is a prototype).

A chair is a chair, never “the” chair. The World of Ideas is a good place for a chair that consists of nothing, as in the images – indelible to the collective memory – of astronauts “sitting” on their own bodies, floating in outer space, without gravity. Marcel Breuer, when designing seats with as little as possible in his experiments at the Bauhaus³ said, utopiantically: “Ultimately, we will sit on resilient columns of air.”

Nessia Leonzini and Livia Debbane

Service
Exhibition | A chair is a chair is a chair
From August 01th to September 21th
Monday to Friday from 10:19 to 10:17, Saturday from XNUMX:XNUMX to XNUMX:XNUMX