Tobias IZSÓ | Off the cuff

The tension of daily life can at times be unbearable. Just so having arrived in the cosy security of one’s own four walls, having lowered the keychain onto the dresser, thrown both jacket and scarf onto the old coat rack, and finally having dropped one’s bottom, after a long day, onto one’s favourite chair, restlessness sets in. Silently, internally, gently at first, then becoming ever louder. Does it have to do with the growing pile of laundry on the designated armchair in the corner, or with the dripping faucet whose sealing ring gently but noticeably attempts to claim its retirement, or with the dust settling on the furniture, sparkling particularly mesmerizingly in the last rays of the setting sun? While beneath the skin things are bubbling away, the surfaces of objects seemingly remain in representative calm. Yet as soon as one is not looking, hidden forces come to light: paternal shirt sleeves emancipate themselves from the rest of the fabric and deliver a trivial, quasi improvised speech; the fabric sample catalog grows up into its full size and wriggles onto the canary-yellow floor, in an attempt to shake off the constricting cataloguing of its own petit bourgeois-old fashioned textures; the elastic bentwood-zipper tests the boundaries, where the coercion to make a connection might be contradicted. The assembled pieces exhibit differently tempered character traits – and only a few are as harmless as they appear. Oversized shoelaces, resembling narwhal tusks, grow out of the wall and thread themselves smugly and self-determinedly through two shoe uppers. A shortened jacket mimics the elegant Viennese wickerwork of Thonet; however, it appears rigid and inflexible in comparison to the soft and slightly worn-out lining which it covers. The former Sunday finery and the role models associated with it have evidently not aged well. Finally, the laundry chair is allocated a decisive role between the two poles of this gathering: it guards yesterday’s clothes for a future tomorrow, impatient and increasingly expanding entropically, thus becoming a symbol both of the desire for order and the reality of life at the same time. While the enforced renunciation of a public life in the time of Biedermeier led to an increased appreciation for the treasures of the private sphere, today we are faced with the question of how to engage with a material and spiritual inheritance that understands confinement as well-being. The answer persists in a tense feeling of restlessness, and the attempt to break new ground by relentlessly scraping away and reshaping predefined patterns.