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Big Household
Original title: Gran domèstic
1987
Iron, lead, plaster, ceramic and glass
Dimensions: 215 x 110 x 26 cm
Reference: ACF0472
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Jordi Colomer’s work is defined by an impure language that shuns uniformity. Generally put together from simple geometrical elements (usually everyday objects such as plates, tables, boxes, carpets, cupboards and chairs), architectural elements (pedestals and models of imaginary cities), or photographs in which he uses filmic devices, the end result poses a challenge to perception. In the piece Gran domèstic (1987) he brings together, in a collage-like way, a set of quite heterogeneous elements that includes a rectangular iron structure, a lead tube from some item of household electrical equipment, a piece of plaster, and a pile of china plates. Writing, understood as marks, stamped with an alien tattoo, is also there on the skin of the materials.
Isolated, taken out of context and rearranged in a new discourse, objects, fragments and words lose their functional nature and meaning. Moreover, in this new spatial layout, the vestiges of the everyday environment cease to be inanimate bodies and actively involve us in another reality that domesticates them. Artifices of reason or ironies of the banal, those artefacts become constructions with a strong presence, devices which, technologically, are somewhat provisional and precarious. In short, they are complex material fabrics governed at the same time by stability and movement, order and disorder.
Colomer has said of this work: ‘It was a matter of approaching a humble object through a big staging device, a big pedestal, in other words, a large geometrical rhetoric that ends up supporting that banal, poor object and drawing attention to it as well.’ Gran domèstic belongs to a set of objects of similar appearance, the almost exact repetition of a construction module that situates the sculpture in a single discourse which has revealed itself at different stages. And so, although the work is clearly serial in concept, the artist invites us always to think about objects within a different interpretive framework. Colomer questions the mutation of appearances and the way in which small changes multiply realities in the order of interpretation. The artist seeks to ‘construct a very rigid, very geometrical, ordered, modular structure and, within it, bring about a substitution or introduce a new order, altering it minimally, but producing something that completely changes the meaning.’
