Sebastian ErraZuriz furniture and artworks get the mind racing
The sideboard is my favourite piece of furniture, so when I recently came across a picture of one on Facebook going by the intriguing name of Explosion, and which opened in a way that suggested it was actually exploding, a serious play with Google was required.
It unveiled the designer maker as Sebastian ErraZuriz, a Chilean born, London-raised artist and designer who straddles the boundaries between the two disciplines of art and function and which has resulted in a body of work created by him which includes furniture, installation and performance art.
“I have designed hundreds of things, from a pair of shoes to a motorcycle to the interior of a private jet,” he says.
“Nevertheless, I feel these are all part of a bigger project that I am trying to create, and each one of these doesn’t constitute a big achievement — yet.”
These are modest words from a man with a prolific output that earned him celebrity status in his native Santiago, thanks to a number of art stunts, including the planting of a tree in the middle of Chile’s national stadium. It transformed the space into a park in memory of political prisoners who were tortured under Pinochet’s rule, and finished with two Chilean teams playing a match around the tree.
Now based in New York, ErraZuriz hasn’t lost the urge to create an artful stunt.
“I had 50 giant screens in Times Square,” he says, “inviting people to yawn, feel contagiously tired, and go back to their homes to talk with their families instead of continuing to consume more stuff they don’t need.”
Another conversation-provoking work, ‘Buy Nothing’, comprises a piece of brightly coloured plastic and cardboard packaging, emblazoned with point of sale jargon, as if it were something worth buying, but with absolutely nothing in it.
At a glance it’s witty, but look again to see the underlying and deadly indictment of our consumer society.
Ironically, the success of “Buy Now” bought ErraZuriz his first car and invited enquiries from big corporations, but along the way there were things that never made it into production.
A wine company to whom he suggested putting the label underneath so the bottle would stand out on the shop shelf, eventually copied a label from Bordeaux.
His floor tile design which when wet would have revealed the words ‘Caution — Slippery When Wet’ was rejected in favour of a floral motif.
It must be liberating to straddle the worlds of art and design, but he says: “It’s something I try not to think about, but try to feel and follow my intuition. I understand art and design as a gradient of greys going from black to white. There is no specific wall in between the two disciplines.
“I’m inviting people to look at furniture design and to forget that we’re talking about furniture. Instead, to see it as a way of breaking a box.
“I love the idea of creating beautiful furniture, nevertheless I am much more interested in using the medium as an excuse to trigger people’s curiosity and create a connection with them.”
With his work showing in places like the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Vitra Design Museum, his private clients are mostly art collectors, whom, he says, already have their walls filled up with great artworks and want to continue filling up their house with high-end pieces, each of which can take anything between four and 16 months to make.
Working at a relentless pace and with such a vast body of work behind him, I didn’t expect him to be able to name a favourite piece, but he’s decisive.
It’s ‘Look Again’, a design for the front door of an art gallery. Referring to the custom of looking though a security peephole to see who is outside, he says,
“We’ve been closing an eye for centuries, it’s about time we opened the other one and looked again.”
So he added a second peephole, but it looks inward rather than outward, for any opportunistic passers-by to take a look inside, even at night, thanks to ErraZuriz persuading the owners to leave on the lights.
“The ‘Look Again’ door is the general metaphor for everything I do,” he explains. “I’m trying to get people to stop and look again at things in a different way, to question the way things could be different.”
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