“The pause” – Benito Quinquela Martín Museum – 2022

The theatre of the absurd consolidated its foundations in 1948, when the Irishman Samuel Beckett wrote his radical piece Waiting for Godot. Nobody knows who this enigmatic character is, but the protagonists await him with the hope of remedying their hardships. When they find out that Godot “will not come today, but it is possible that he will tomorrow”, they agree to return the next day, between disappointment and regret. But in the next moment, nothing more than the same thing happens, giving way to a redundant assumption. The long-awaited Godot never appears, but his absence asserts one thing: the continuous and irremediable repetition of human existence.

When we see Juan Nördlinger’s armchairs and chairs, we can’t help but think about who used them and why. We sit down to rest, to observe, to reflect, and from that position, the seat registers the user’s metamorphosis, his calm, his impatience, his ageing. Nördlinger disarms the furniture, tears it apart on a symbolic level just as time does physically, and in this way he interprets the most intimate wound hidden in the most innocent pool. How much mystery is locked up in the bowels of our armchairs?

From his maternal Austrian heritage, Nördlinger is obsessed with the playful wefts of textiles that run through many of his works. Whether they are antique flowered blankets, delicate pebbled upholstery or strident patchwork blankets, they stand as arguments in favour of the sensuality of curvilinear shapes. Those undulating and rebellious ornaments, typical of the Viennese secession at the end of the 19th century (which the architect Adolf Loos dared to describe as criminal) are for Nördlinger’s work an organic heartbeat, a vital pulse.

Outside the object itself, the artist offers almost no indicators of space, but develops a textural field that, as a dramatic character, shelters -or engulfs?- His gravitating centre, which is the armchair engulfed and consumed by his own condition. They are alchemically worked chromatic limbos, respecting the effects of water spilled flat on acrylic, and capable of opening up a dreamlike universe with visceral force.

Lic. Yamila Valeiras – Curator MBQM