Tomàs Alonso — Variations on a tube — NextLevel Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: October 22 → December 23, 2009

The dimension of Tomas Alonso’s work can be understood like different writings of that question mark. There will be as many answers as variations of interpretations of the models. They are sometimes paradoxical. One should always inclined to believe that freedom is a friend of contradiction.

The tube turns around its subject like a tortured trombone. It never really seems to reach it while physically supporting it (design loves structure). Furthermore it remains whole, as if it tried, in this way also, to mark its distinction.The tube is everywhere parts of a single whole without welding, assembling, nor breakages, except a series of bends. A knot on its way to being freed.

Skeletal next to the sheer volume it accompanies (the body of the furniture, or the domestic interior) the tube is transplanted. First of all, it is a historical prosthesis. Along the path that follows the sinuous line of the tube (stepping from Weimar to Milan), the tube rid itself of its old fashioned implications, no longer associated with plumbing or bicycle tires. Once obscene for the bourgeois outside its modest functions, the tube is still full of promises of modernity.

On this map (here temporal rather than spatial) the tube draws arteries and roads whose coloured gradations no longer designate hierarchies. This design would play on the ideology of a highway the fastest way to get from point A to point B to propose a spectrum of different routes, favouring a journey over speed. The tubes are just as many detours (design maintains an adulterous relation with the detour, but an essential one.)