Furniture Fusion

Cuban artist Alonso Mateo melds furniture, fashion and art

By Alfredo Triff

Alonso Mateo’s chairs are unlikely characters in a game of high and low culture.

One of the most fruitful developments in the history of art in the last two decades is the interpenetration of art and design. Who really cares anymore about the post-World War II, Greenbergian definition of art that separated “high” (painting and sculpture) from “low” (the crafts, such as ceramics, printmaking, graphic design and textiles)?

Our post-postmodern “blurring of boundaries” consciousness harks back to Charles Baudelaire’s call to modern artists “to extract poetry from fashion … to distill the eternal from the transitory.” It happened with the Arts and Crafts revolution in England, which influenced Art Nouveau in Europe and, later, the Bauhaus in Germany. The present predicament is the expected outcome of the early 21st-century explosion of technologies, the popularization of design and the idea of culture as spectacle.

In today’s global world, fashion constantly absorbs from painting, sculpture and even performance art. Graphic design’s urban awareness sends stylistic content throughout the media. Industrial design borrows from computer animation while architecture borrows from installation art. Furniture design (an ideal medium for technological and ideological breakthrough) has become more sculptural, whereas sculpture has become more functional.

For a real-life example of all this abstraction, visit artist Alonso Mateo’s El Gabinete del Doctor (The Doctor’s Cabinet) at the Fireside Gallery. Mateo, a Cuban artist who studied during the 1980s at the Superior Institute of Arts in Cuba under Bedia and Consuelo Castañeda, lived in Mexico for more than a decade before coming to the United States three years ago.  

The exhibit, which takes its theme from Arturo Mosquera’s dental office in the Miami neighborhood of Westchester, reminds one of Wunderkammer, or “cabinets of curiosities” during Europe’s Renaissance, which mixed art with natural science, geology, archeology and mystical relics. Mateo has always been interested in the social aura surrounding celebrities, his art negotiating the high and low limits between the values of popular culture, the rich and famous, pop and haute design. Recently, he had a show in Wynwood featuring elongated and distorted paintings of fashion design mavericks (such as Valentino, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Galiano, Dolce and Gabbana), as they appeared in the popular photos of ¡Hola! magazine, Spain’s tabloid devoted to Europe’s jet set.

Mateo presents his sculptures, furniture and paintings inside a blue-painted gallery embellished with gilded fleur-de-lis prints. Sombrero, a black dress hat fixed to the wall with its inside showing a solid gold-painted wooden mold surface, exudes a surreal humor worthy of artist Max Ernst (for whom “only the hat expresses the softness of the brain”).    

Otoño/Invierno (Autumn/Winter) is a big “painting” (98x55 inches) displaying a section of a stretched man’s jacket, containing lapel with buttonhole, breast pocket and sleeve. The artist leaves the lapel hanging, as if affirming that this is literally a semi-stretched piece of garment rather than a painting. More sculptural is Instruments, a series of gilded wood-carved sculptures displayed on a long shelf, a sort of bombastic dentist’s tool-set (with burnisher, spatula, mouth-pick, etc). They could also be seen as a collection of chair parts, or hybrids between utility and futility.

Equine-Foot Chair is a small Italian Neoclassical side chair, upholstered with tendril-like motifs in red and gold. It exhibits an oval-shaped back, swollen cushion-seat and tapered leg (embellished with fluting), its end turned inward, as if revealing clubfoot condition. Mateo’s Chair #2 is an impossible, deconstructed, anti-functional armchair (in the style of Art Nouveau), with an elevated cushion that caves in, Cabriole legs and armrests with ostrich engravings, all painted in gold. Finally, there’s 3 Pañuelos (Three Handkerchiefs), a suit with a three-pocket jacket breast exhibiting colorful hankies.

This intersection between furniture, fashion and art, sometimes called “object sculpture,” has been explored since the late 1980s with different aims and results by artists Jeff Koons (with whom Mateo should sympathize), Haim Steinbach, Jorge Pardo and Richard Wentworth, whose hybrids join, cut, insert and reassemble the multifarious. Mateo is sort of in between Koons’ exploration of kitsch and class and designer Jorge Pardo’s nonfunctional objects (Pardo just had a big show at MoCA). Whereas Pardo makes a chair/sculpture that looks like a regular chair, Mateo makes a chair/sculpture that looks like an impossible place to sit.  

According to Mateo, The Doctor’s Cabinet may open a direction for the artist, where the work revolves more particularly around a theme, whether it’s a local Miami celebrity, a decadent aesthetic subject or just plain kitsch, of which we Miamians have plenty.     

Alonso Mateo’s The Doctor’s Cabinet, through April 12, is at Farside Gallery, 1305 87th Ave., 305-264-3355, by appointment, from 11 a.m.-5 p.m.