‘I am the curator of my own misery,” reads a 2010 text by Douglas Gordon. Originally drawn in ballpoint pen direct on a gallery wall, it has now been carefully rendered in a small oil painting by Buenos Aires painter Laura Ojeda Bär. She hasn’t only painted the text, but also the wall it has been written on. Gordon’s pungent text has implications, and so too do the other artworks, from Tate and other British collections, which Bär has painted and ranged around the terracotta-coloured adobe-plastered walls of an installation created by the Argentinian sculptor Gabriel Chaile. Among them are Phillip King’s daft 1963 sculpture Tra-La-La, an Alexander Calder mobile, a dangling Louise Bourgeois figure, Rachel Whiteread’s cast of the interior of a hot-water bottle, an Easter Island head, a set of Dan Flavin neon tubes and an image of the Townley Diskobolos, a classical Greek sculpture in the British Museum collection. These muted, precise paintings are at odds with the way they’re presented here.
Grouped as little conversations around the gallery and sometimes hung askew, Bär’s paintings argue among themselves. They jostle at odd, out-of-whack angles. One canvas tilts on the wall like a drunk, but the image on its surface maintains its poise and equilibrium, perfectly aligned to the horizontal and vertical. Usos y Costumbres, which translates as “customs and habits”, wrongfoots us at every turn. Everything, it seems, is unstable.
Chaile has clad the gallery’s interior with false walls, and plastered them with adobe, one of the world’s most ancient building materials, comprising mud, clay and straw. Bär’s transcriptions are interrupted by lumps and errant marks inscribed by Chaile into the roughly-finished adobe – as if symbols or diagrams had been begun there, but left unfinished, like traces of occult messages. Adobe is still a typical building material in the region of northern Argentina where Chaile is from, and he frequently uses it in the construction of his sculptures, which often resemble mythical animals, ancient artefacts, archaeological finds and prosaic cooking vessels, pots and clay bread ovens. One of these objects stands on a sort of runway in the middle of the gallery. You think this great rotund thing might start rolling towards you and, seen head on, it resembles an off-kilter, bulging bowling ball. It is actually more like a giant clamshell. On one face it has skinny serpentine arms, one open and one closed eye, and what seems to be an egg in the middle of its forehead. The reverse face of this sculpture appears to be growing buttocks, but hasn’t got there yet.
The more you look, the odder it all gets. What are those objects on the high windowsill, more visible from the other side of the window seen from the street? One is a plastic megaphone, bearing the slogan, in Portuguese, Migrantes São Bem-Vindos, or “Migrants Welcome”. Stuck in Lisbon during the first Covid lockdown, Chaile saw this phrase on a poster, and used it to generate a number of collaborative projects he has initiated in the city, where he continues to live and work. Last year, a number of his sculptures were in the main exhibition at the Venice Biennale, and he currently has a large adobe sculpture on New York’s High Line.
Ideas circulate, forms and materials migrate from one place to another, along with people, who bring with them their own customs and habits. Stories of origin and arrival have neither discernible beginnings nor ends. Chaile’s northern Argentinian culture is itself a mixture of Afro-Arabic, Spanish and Indigenous Candelaria heritage. while the well-known artworks featured in Bär’s paintings have origins and impulses whose ideas and forms are the results of all kinds of cultural collisions and coincidences, like Chaile’s own work, they have a complex lineage and genealogy.
Two larger paintings present a woozily distorted portrait of Chaile and another a self-portrait in which Bär’s face undergoes a transformation, as though she were swooning, overcome by sleep or delirium. Further paintings by Bär have been built into the walls of the installation, using box-like framing devices whose built-up clay encroaches on their surfaces. The paintings protrude from the surrounding walls, while their perspectives are architectural illusions, painted apertures seemingly puncturing the walls of the room and framing views of blue and grey skies, morning and evening light, a rainbow. Stranger it all gets, and stranger still. Why are there two tangerines on a low shelf? We might think that Chaile has provided a mise-en-scène for Bär’s paintings, or that she decorates Chaile’s adobe interior, but the project is more collaborative, mysterious and reciprocal than this.
The gallery space was originally built as an annexe to the Methodist church which once stood across the narrow street, and was destroyed during the blitz. In the dim warmth of the adobe interior, Chaile and Bär’s Usos y Costumbres refers obliquely to the building’s former use. With its atmosphere of interconnectedness and happenstance, the whole thing has a kind of lightness, gravity and humour. They have created a respite from misery.
• Usos y Costumbres by Gabriel Chaile in collaboration with Laura Ojeda Bär is at Studio Voltaire, London, until 10 September 2023
