Chairs

In 1993-1994, Wojciech Fangor produced a series of ten pictures featuring chairs. Previous to that, he painted already other series called Interfaces Space, Television Pictures, Polish Kings and Indian Chiefs, which presented different kinds of portraits and referred to the particularity of cultural phenomena from the time he was living in the United States.
Wojciech Fangor was intrigued by the tension between the ideal and the phenomenal, between what seems to be perfect and the ordinary that can be seen or found in the material world surrounding us. He was fascinated by musical instruments and their perfect shapes and was searching for similar forms among objects like chairs. Chairs, as well as musical instruments, are shaped according to the features of the human body, and they reflect a historical and social attitude towards it.
 When Fangor painted chairs, he talked about cultural diversity, about different traditions behind each of them. He painted chairs as if he were painting a group portrait, bringing the distinguishing features and qualities to the fore not by way of draughtsmanship highlighting the uniqueness of an object but through the form of painting that emphasized the always unique “familiarity” of a green chair, a red chair, a French or an American one. Fangor's paintings are not arresting because of the different designs of chairs, which would be the case in a furniture shop, but because of the way they convey the experience of a situation involving people, places and times. The chairs have an aura, evoking a different mixture of emotions in each case: some carry a semblance of pleasant relaxation associated with a patio or garden, an atmosphere that can also be familiar to our parents, if not their parents, while others are suggestive of life and work in the country, accentuating their functionality by austerity and plainness. All the chairs in the paintings have at least three structural components: a set of (usually four) legs, a seat and a backrest. Some are collapsible. The way the legs, the backrest or the seat are shaped, whether they are ornamented and what the ornaments are, if any—such are the sources of knowledge about a chair and the influences that materialized in it. In some cases it comes down to a brilliant formal shortcut; the centuries-old tradition or culture of a nation or an entire region of the world contained in an object. Every chair painted by Fangor says a lot about itself—and about us. A café chair, green, of the sort typically encountered in pavement cafés in France rather than elsewhere, although quite popular in Poland as well; if we happen on them today in the United States, Argentina or China, the high pace of the spreading of cultures from one country to another becomes even more evident. An American chair, an essential in every hotel or saloon featured in a western film; this type is now frequently on offer in major furniture stores, painted white and sold as a kitchen chair. Fangor confronted these chairs with their history, reminding them of their age and the aura that has piled up on them over time. He did it in such a way that permits us to participate. It is not without significance that the paintings in the series were produced in Santa Fe once Fangor had looked around his new abode and acquired a taste for that special place in the USA whose historic architecture is instantly reminiscent of its past.
 Having seen Chairs, Aleksander Wojciechowski made a reference to the tradition of metaphysical painting, from Giotto through Masaccio and Uccello to De Chirico, in which, as he put it, “Removed from their original surroundings and stripped of their utility, they [objects] were essentially ‘monuments of ideas’. Such an approach to objects is evident in some of Fangor's figurative paintings. An example is his series depicting empty chairs: Red (1994), Green (1993), Chair (1994), American (1994), and many other works that are similar in intent and design.” (A. Wojciechowski, katalog wystawy, Wojciech Fangor, CSW Zamek Ujazdowski, Warszawa 2003)