The Monobloc Chairs

industrial production vs art

Monobloc chairs are stackable, plastic chairs that are said to be one of the world’s most common chairs due to their low cost and quick and easy production; with one being made via an injection moulding process in just 70 seconds.

This week I thought I’d have a look at one of my own paintings, titled ‘The Monobloc Chairs’ and finished sometime mid 2024. The painting is based off a photo I took on my phone a few years ago out of my old bedroom window, I liked the photo in terms of the structuring of the photograph and I thought it could make a good painting.

The arrangement of the chairs was initially the key reason I found it interesting as they look almost amidst conversation. The leaves on the seats show their lack of use in the cooler autumn season, they’re not being used and are left to their own devices. It kind of makes me think of the personification of objects we see in a lot of moving image media, where things become ‘alive’ at night when they’re not being perceived (Toy Story, Night at the Museum, and a 1992 children’s animation series called The Gingerbread Man), and it feels like these chairs are suddenly frozen. Thinking about it now, I guess this idea also closely resembles a few ideas in philosophy like the whole ‘If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?’ concept, Idealism, and maybe even, at a reach, of the observer effect in physics. I feel there’s a whole branch of potential with the seemingly obsession humanity has with how we see things and the validity and reality of it, as well as a sort of fear of what happens with things we can’t see, but we’re not going fully into all that now.

The leaves in the image give a sense of place within the seasonal timeline. The fragmented detailing of the leaves across the whole painting help to give the viewer the knowledge that we’re looking down at the scene, due to the fact they don’t fade in the distance. This is also helped by the lack of skyline in the image, as all we see is floor and chairs. This lack of skyline also turns the painting as a whole to less of a landscape painting, and urges it to become more about the chairs themselves, they’re the focal point and subject almost as one cohesive unit. In addition to this, it also allows the flooring of leaves to become an abstract background and accentuate the chairs themselves, which is also exaggerated by the outlining around them in dark brown which adds contrast against the white. The blue tarp in the top right blends into and becomes a part of the background, while also giving an additional visual interest to the painting, due to the blue cuttingly complementing the autumnal tones.

I went back and forth with how ‘realistic’ I wanted this painting to be. I didn’t want it to be too abstract, however I wanted to add some intentionally stylised aspects, which I think I managed to do fairly well by leaving some under painted sections visible, in a pentimento-ish way, to try and balance some of the overly worked parts with the bordering comical outlines. I was inspired to leave some parts of the unfinished/not fully developed as a while ago I saw a painting in the art gallery where you could see some of the under painting, especially in the foliage, and found it interesting.

I had a difficult time painting the leaves, as its something I hadn’t done before and was trying to figure out how much i wanted to depict them as individual leaves vs the impression of the mass of the leaves, especially with the way they don’t trek off into the distance like in landscape paintings. The tone of the painting is quite yellower than I’d maybe like, I could have leaned more towards an orange tone? This is something I only thought about after I finished the painting, so I would like to try at some point keeping this in mind throughout the painting process, and maybe even try utilising a cohesive palette technique. In addition to this, I think the chairs are possibly a bit out of proportion with each other which is something I can easily fix if I really want to, however I think I will leave it as is.

I like the fact these types of chairs are made so quickly as it heavily contrasts with the fact that I spent a good few months painting them. It does make it kind of ironic when you hold these two facts together and goes to question what was even the point, which seems to be a relevant topic in the current climate, and with AI especially. I could easily just have bought a couple of monobloc chairs, in a Ready Made/Duchamp way, it would’ve been faster, cheaper and also more useful since I could actually sit in them. I don’t think I could sit in this painting, perhaps I could sit on the painting itself but i have a feeling it wouldn’t be very comfortable.

The chairs in the painting aren’t real chairs they’re an imitation of a picture of some chairs. Also the fact that these chairs aren’t useful at all in this context; the chairs can’t be utilised like they were made for. So i think that could be another interesting aspect; painting something useful and so making it un-useful. I would like to paint more things along the idea of these fast made cheap objects and in contrast spending months doing a detailed work on them and as well as this make some paintings of objects that by painting them, it renders them useless. Possibly the contrast of time and creation idea could be more effective as a video work, as a kind of performance, action art type thing.