Found materials on display in the current shows by Lucia Nogueira and Gabriel Orozco create a feeling of dangerous freedom that emanates from a deft and exact handling of simple stuff. Chairs, bin liners, fridge-freezers, framed photographs, ceiling fans, toilet rolls and clay are displaced and poised to form provisional relationships that appear casual and yet create a momentum where things solidly depend upon one another, for just a fraction of time.

Nogueira and Orozco exhibit a wry curiosity towards the everyday matter explored in their expansive respective solo shows. Within each series of installations lies a powerful interplay of physical energies that pervades, invades and collides, disconcerting and subverting our relationship to everyday matter. Empty space is coldly and deliberately juxtaposed against the warmth of familiar materials, nothing can feel too secure where the slightest part of an object is truncated, traceable yet absent or missing. The result of such tension is both infectious and intoxicating.

A trail of small white bin liners lays scattered yet anchored by the root of one leg of a seat-less chair. ‘Mischief’ a sculpture created by the late Brazilian installation artist Lucia Nogueira in 1995 brilliantly plays with the notion of void. An unnecessary empty space drops and emerges from the wooden chair, accidental or deliberate, challenging the stretch of uniform holes that appear on the floor as one bin liner joins to form another. The relationship between chosen objects is vital and provides a sense of inherent discomfort that is affirming. The installation is instructive and powerful, edging the willing spectator towards a feeling of falling produced by the obvious stupid accident that awaits the occupant of the chair. Nogueira composes a feeling of delicate and dangerous mystery in balancing and unbalancing objects, subverting the function of everyday stuff. In ‘Hide and Seek’ created in 1997, a small framed photograph of a bunny rests at the precipice of a new fridge-freezer standing facing towards a wall to display entrails of black electrical elements and a protruding white cord and plug that trails out across the floor. Bolstered by polystyrene packaging, the object sits in an unnerving manner just above the ground, exposed and redundant, awaiting attendance.

‘Ventilator’ created by Orozco in 1997 contrasts this impulse. Toilet rolls positioned atop each blade of a ceiling fan activates the movement of air, trailing and swirling white paper trains to form a reverse cyclone. Instantly and momentarily I am living in the memory of throwing industrial-sized quantities of the stuff from the fourth floor of a cheap Paris hotel with a fellow Year 8 artist – a substitute for going clubbing in Montmartre, since we were both too young. Orozco invokes participation in viewing objects in a futile way in relation to their practical function. Using his rigorous set of rules, the logical design of everyday stuff is unraveled, fuelling sculptures with ignominy and quixotic beauty.

‘My Hands Are My Heart,’ created by Orozco in 1991, is composed of a lump of clay squeezed between the palms of his hands revealing an unnerving heart shaped sculpture seemingly rippled by a rib-cage effect created by the indents of the artists fingers. The object rests sideways, stationary in a plastic cage, isolated from the hands that invented it and distant from the photograph of the same title that records it. Nogueira’s spectacular work spanned only a short, decade long career including several series of paintings. The sexually charged, neo-expressionistic watercolours on display augment the visceral emotions rising from sculptures created with consistent skill. 

This is in contrast to the ‘Samuari’s Tree’ series of paintings Orozco first produced in 2004, latterly expanding to form an installation ‘Samuari Tree Invariants,’ distracting from Orozco’s careful economy of visual language and forming an increasingly insidious presence. Both artist suspend and balance our relationship to everyday objects and at times, gravity seems to hang in the balance and a lighter sense of being beckons. Reminded of Ecclesiastes, when we are given permission to free ourselves from the conventions of time placed upon us and lose dogma, we enter a place where time appears as ‘mere breath’.

Viewing work by Nogueira and Orozco feels like entering an accentuated lightness of being, where it seems understood that to hang onto delicate beauty too closely, threatens our equilibrium and negates the power of the absence and presence of God in our lives.

MISCHIEF, sculptures and drawings by Lucia Nogueira, at Kettle’s Yard till 13 March 2011
Gabriel Orozco at Tate Modern till 11 April 2011

A version of this review was first published in Third Way Magazine, February 2011