TEXT BY JORGE VILLACORTA
Of all the furnishings that surround the human being in a life, the chair is the piece that maintains the closest relationship to him, to the point that its sole presence has been employed by a great number of visual artists as a symbol of an absence, irreparable or not. This absence brings with it the possibility of experimenting expectation as a consubstantial state in life in relation to others. Other artists, on the contrary, have presented the chair occupied by a figure possessed of such abandonment that it becomes the support of the individual in his loneliness, the representation of a physical backup of the conscience in the emotional breakdown.
Adriana Tomatis has found an alternate way to both representations. Even though in this new series of works she begins with the affective association in her memory of the person to whom the chair belonged, the chair she paints again and again does not seem, in any case, to take on the aspect of a seat for the forsaken or an emblem for the absent person.
The chair she paints, much larger than any regular chair, shelters a series of bodies of both sexes that relate differently to it. One could say it plays openly with each body the painter has used as a model. It is clear that the chair does not belong to any one of them, but it is an element in a ludic situation, a sort of changing seats, as one model cedes it to another with complete freedom. Adriana Tomatis is the one that decides who and when and how, and this gives the series of paintings a performance quality.
The ludic aspect is reinforced in the series of images–drawings transferred to paper, handmade by the artist, in which the chair appears empty but in a natural relationship with more individuals which could be members of a family, for whom the chair has turned into another member–even a pet is portrayed on the seat as if she were in someone´s arms, as if an accompanying spirit had incarnated in this old piece of furniture, converting from an inert witness to a companion.
The pictoric approximation suggests a current of empathy flowing. The paintings tendency to be a light watery green immediately suggests a fluid softness that eludes the grave accents of any invocation of a memory as sacred. In this pictoric mode there appears a freshness which, by the trace of the drawing on the canvas and the natural irregularities of the handmade paper, contributes to the image always.
Adriana Tomatis explores a familiarity on a daily code which is presented to us in an object that recovers life and inspires a fiction of very brief narration: a plot encased by a will that knows the facets of an impermanent world.
October, 2014.