The
Worn Leather Chair
circa 2012
An old, torn,
pathetic-looking armchair glorified for its overuse and obvious mistreatment.
Is this beautiful? Does this scene bring out a pitiless kind of sadness in the
viewer? Does is evoke shock? Seeing as none of us really views a piece of furniture as an animate, 'real' thing (or
do we?), could anyone really care for something so crude?
Yes. This answer
speaks on behalf of no matter how small the minority is who treats and cares
for its so-called non-living things as parts of their personality, as their defining
tags of identity. This chair means something to someone, to this contemporary
artist - so much so that he immortalised its portrait so lovingly, so
accurately and realistically, down to the dull shine of the legs and railings
and to the fraying tongues of the stained leather cushion and back, that the
naked presence of this chair is far more striking as it is now than if a
bejewelled Catherine Deneuve sat herself down in it for a short rest. This
chair is a slice of time; it shows slash after slash of days gone by, of
moments lived and lost. It shows age at its ugliest. It shows that Rose
attempts to bring out the truth of how the things we choose to label as
unimportant or silly can manifest themselves in tangible forms, in things that simply cannot be swept under the
rug. Slightly askew in its frame, a bit wobbly here and there, this chair proves
this truth - thus Rose succeeds.
