About - Chairs, Grids, Maps, and Presence

In Brief:

I worked with small-scale chairs, arranging them in studio boxes, including gridded containers, to explore structure, containment, and relational dynamics, and extended these arrangements onto the beach where chance and natural forces intervened.

Context:

In the studio, the chairs were arranged in configurations that functioned as relational propositions, often evoking social or psychological states rather than purely formal compositions. Titles emerged naturally from these arrangements: Back-to-Back, Face-the-Wall, Formal Meeting, Lean-on-Me, Line-Up, Tête-à-Tête, Confined, Group-Meeting, and Interrogation. Each explored distance, orientation, intimacy, or hierarchy, using the chair as a stand-in for the body.

Some configurations were placed within painted boxes, including a dark blue box that created a contained, almost theatrical space where gestures and relationships could be observed as if on a stage, and a white box that offered a neutral, analytical setting, allowing the same arrangements to be read structurally, emphasizing alignment, spacing, and relational logic. Across both boxes, the chairs acted as markers of presence and interaction, revealing subtle human behaviors in miniature. The boxes themselves functioned as 'containers', establishing bounded spatial fields and framing the chairs’ relational logic.

Cardboard boxes collected from the streets were used throughout this period and became independent artworks. Some became contained, stage-like spaces when painted inside to host chairs, maintaining their identity as painted boxes. Others became grids, interventions that compromised their structural integrity. I was aware that grids are typically used to maintain stability and integrity, and I enjoyed the contradiction of carving the boxes into grids, causing them to lose both. Once cut, the boxes sagged, tilted, and warped, no longer able to hold their original shape. The grids introduced visibility and constraint simultaneously, creating spaces that acted as cages or prisons, areas that restricted what was inside while repelling the outside.

I covered the internal surfaces of some boxes with text, so that language occupied the space as fully as the objects within them; these boxes never contained anything else. In this way, the boxes functioned not only as physical structures but as containers of ideas. Sometimes the altered, gridded boxes contained chairs that responded to the yielding surfaces and distorted grids, and at other times they remained empty, their presence and tension shaped by fragility, exposure, and containment.

Alongside these installations, I produced drawings based on similar grid structures, often without chairs, focusing on the carved forms themselves. These drawings explored order and collapse, repetition and variation, and the vulnerability of structure once its integrity was broken. Painted questions appeared directly on the surface, making the act of reflection visible and extending the grid from a spatial structure into a reflective, psychological framework.

The work extended to the beach, where chairs were arranged deliberately within ditches, set in lines, partially buried, or positioned opposite one another across marked rectangles, while rows were aligned near the waterline. Environmental forces introduced chance and temporality, highlighting how human-scale order interacts with unpredictability. One winter installation, a larger-than-usual wave swept a chair out to sea. I followed its slow journey along the shoreline until it returned over an hour later, a moment later titled The Survivor. This chair became a powerful symbol of endurance, contingency, and the fragile persistence of human constructs when confronted by natural forces. Across both studio and beach, the work investigated how intention, arrangement, and relational order persist in dialogue with time, chance, and exposure.

Paintings made during this period connected the chairs to maps, bringing in orientation, displacement, and scale, situating the chair as measure within broader systems of navigation and organization. One painting, titled Legend, was a nod not only to a map of part of Barcelona with a chair placed within it, but also to the fact that maps include a Legends -a key to understanding the relationships and symbols within the mapped space. I also enjoyed the ide of the word Legend – as in it’s other meaning, within which the Survivor Chair fitted well. Together with installations and drawings, these works linked individual presence to wider frameworks of movement, territory, and social or natural order.

The project carried echoes of literary influence, particularly Marin Sorescu’s Evening after Evening, translated by Michael Hamburger in 1983, whose attention to repetition, waiting, and endurance informed the temporal and relational qualities of the work. As Sorescu writes: “evening after evening / I collect all the available chairs in the neighbourhood and read them poems.” This quiet ritual resonates with the project’s sustained attention to placement, persistence, and care, emphasizing the power of patient observation over time.

Taken together, the work explored the tension between order and chance, structure and exposure, containment and survival. Across studio and beach, box and drawing, painting and installation, modest objects become metaphors for human presence and relational dynamics, always provisional, and always in dialogue with the forces around them.

Linda Sgoluppi Art