Nordlinger interprets intimate wounds hidden in the most innocent armchair

Rest

Impressions by Yamila Valeiras, curator of the MBOQM, on the temporary exhibition of Juan Nordlinger that took place at the Quinquela Martin Museum in October 2022.

The Theatre of the Absurd consolidated its foundations in 1948, when the Irishman Samuel Beckett wrote his radical play Waiting for Godot. Nobody knows who this enigmatic character is, but the protagonists wait for him with the illusion that he will solve their problems. When they learn that Godot “will not come today, but may come tomorrow”, they agree to return the next day with disappointment and regret. But in the next act, more of the same happens, leading to redundant assumptions. The desired Godot never appears, but his absence confirms one thing: the continuous and irremediable repetition of human existence.

When we see Juan Nordlinger’s armchairs and chairs, we can’t help but wonder who used them and why. We sit down to rest, to observe, to reflect, and it is from this position that the chair registers the metamorphosis of the user within, his tranquility, his impatience, his aging.

Nordlinger dismantles the furniture, tearing it apart on a symbolic level, just as time does physically, interpreting the most intimate wound hidden in the most innocent backwater. How many secrets are hidden in the entrances to our chairs? Nordlinger is obsessed with the playful fabrics that run through many of his works. Whether its antique floral throws, delicate rocaille upholstery or rustling patchwork throws, they appeal to the sensuality of curvilinear forms. The undulating and rebellious ornaments of the late 19th-century Viennese Secession (which the architect Adolf Loos dared to call criminal) are for Nordlinger’s work an organic heartbeat, a vital pulse. Outside the object itself, the artist offers almost no indications of space, but develops a textural field that, like a dramatic character, shelters – or devours – its gravitational center, the armchair, phagocytized and consumed by its own condition. They are chromatic elements, alchemically worked, respecting the effects of the water poured on the acrylic, capable of opening a dreamlike universe with force.