In the hands of the Brazilian artist José Bechara, the ordinary house realizes its potential to be anything but simple. By just making small alterations to the standard elements of almost anyone’s home—a door, a window, a bed, a table, and a chair—Bechara fundamentally challenges one’s sense of shelter while revealing the symbolic power that these elements hold in the shared imagination.
The furniture installation Not Now, Please (2006) is a good introduction to the resources Bechara employs to expose the conceptual foundations of symbols of shelter. The clean lines and muted tones of the plastic laminate and wood modernist furnishings from the 1960s and 70s—particularly the large, white, circular table which provides a kind of axis for the arrangement—easily resolve themselves into the compositional elements of geometric abstraction. They are nothing more than circles and squares, but their symbolic power is unaltered by their arrangement.
What makes the result extraordinary is Bechara’s ability to identify and create combinations of these elements that deny our ideas about how they ought to relate. A mattress, of a powerfully bright teal that relieves the otherwise monochromatic ensemble, serves as a kind of bed for the artist’s chaos of cabinetry. Tables erupt out of desks or sprout from a bookcase leaning away from the composition at a precarious angle. An illuminated lamp, resting vertically atop the jumble, crowns the composition and emphatically removes it from the realm of the likely while simultaneously confirming its perfect plausibility. One’s internal sense of the proper almost demands an intervention by the viewer to produce a less disorienting disorder.
From the open glass doors of cabinets that echo the windows in Bechara’s photographs to the water-stained surface of a desk echoed in the oxidation on a sculpture, what seems like an abnormally random amalgamation of things is actually a useful guide to Bechara’s conceptual processes. A table does not cease to be a table simply because it is supported at an uncomfortable angle between other pieces of furniture also placed in unconventional positions that are equally at odds with one’s expectations of their utility. Function constantly challenges form in Bechara’s work. He begins with questions with answers that have always been “Because” and then provides a number of alternative responses that show the standard response is not inevitable.
The exhibition’s five beautifully crafted sculptures extend the sensorial challenges of the installation as perfect rectangles of doors and windows of equally perfect modernist cubes overflow with dynamically jumbled furniture. The three-dimensional works, built from the same plastic laminate that covers much of the installation’s furniture or from wood ingeniously oxidized to resemble steel, present a collision between the iconic lines of modernism and the physical reality of entropy.
The relatively small scale of these works invites intimacy; it also provokes a stronger urge to impose a kind of order. The viewer’s immediate impulse is to smooth the cube, to restore the line. Yet that impulse is restrained by the realization that any intervention in the physicality of the object would lead only to further destabilization and deconstruction of the internal ideals one seeks to restore.
On first encounter, the grainy photographs from the Nova [New] and Temporária [Temporary] series (both 2004–06) appear to be based on the exhibition’s sculptures. They are instead documents of installations constructed around the core of a house-sized cube built within a cavernous industrial space, which provides an eerie, nonspecific setting in which scale again plays with one’s sense of possibility.
The overall effect of Bechara’s work is magnified in the photographs from the Paisagem Doméstica ou não me lembro do que dissemos ontem [Domestic Landscape or I do not remember what we said yesterday] series (2002–06), where Bechara combines mass-produced furniture with mass-produced housing in a real suburban setting. Against the dappled white exterior walls of one house, a beige cushion, a red wooden table with a serial number plaque, and a green cushion project from a window: the aptly named Boca [Mouth] takes on almost human features. The titles of two adjacent sculptures, Gemeas com sombra [Twins with Shadow] (2006) and Duas cabezas com amarelo [Two heads with yellow] (2006), further reinforce the human metaphor.
Although Bechara’s chaotic furniture is most frequently described an explosion from within, there is no visual evidence that suggests it might not be an implosion—or that both actions are taking place, as if the houses were breathing.
Bechara’s works are not expressly critiques of the ideals of modernist architecture, yet it is clear that his houses are not machines for living; they are something closer to permeable containers of the lives within them and of all the messy complications that life entails.
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