A CADEIRA (The Chair)

About

A CADEIRA (The Chair) is a project that result from a casual meeting between Arturo Comas and the representative Portuguese chair Gonçalo, as a phenomenological element of the urban landscape in Portugal. The sinuous, tubular design and optimized utility—two of the artist's various themes of work and research in recent projects—led to an investigation of the forms and visual possibilities of his construction through delicate and elegant modifications of the original design. 

This project could have been developed in a freeway, reproducing the original forms, but it was composed with a commitment to the truthfulness of the manufacturing process, boosting direct contact with ARCALO, located in Cartaxo (factory that owns the patent for the chair). After a year of repeated visits to better understand the production process - in what has become almost a bespoke artist residency, Comas designs a series of pieces that Manuel Caldas himself (manager of ARCALO) agreed to execute in his factory.

The object/chair is modified in different perspectives, resulting in sculptural pieces with impossible lines and absolute uselessness, despite, without ever repudiating the process and finishes that make it possible to conserve some of its original forms, strangely probable and absurd.

Comas takes advantage of the parallelism of volume and proportion of the spatiality of the NAVE gallery and the industrial warehouse where the ARCALO factory is located, reproducing his artistic interpretation of the object's production line. The exhibition symbolizes a space of laboratory and permanent construction, between the combination of sculpture, installation and photography that appropriate the real process through the artist's disciplined look, sensitive to the verisimilitude of the contemporaneity of everyday objects.