tatiane freitas' sculptures complete missing parts of broken chairs with translucent acrylic

Tatiane Freitas completes broken wooden chairs with translucent acrylic to create what may be deemed as kintsugi sculptures. Inside Guy Hepner Editions gallery in New York City, Tatiane Freitas sits or kneels on the floor for days and nights. She is cutting up sheets of wax paper with pencil linings on them with unwavering focus, perfecting the art of slicing with a pair of scissors. These blueprints, once drawings, have become the symmetrical grids that uniformly line up her acrylic chair sculptures for her exhibition.

‘A Hole Which Remains’ seems a fitting name for the show which runs until August 31st, 2023. These tiny chairs, which look like they can be pocketed when no one is looking or stashed in a bag like grocery items, hang on the walls of Guy Hepner Editions, suspended to create a whimsical visual play against the white backdrop. From afar, they seem incomplete. Up close, the tiny chairs that Tatiane Freitas worked on come to a full circle as she sculpts and molds acrylic into the missing pieces of the seats.

My Old New Mirrow, 2019 | images by Tatiane Freitas

Tatiane Freitas ponders for her New York exhibition. For instance, she wonders how an event can affect the world, be it micro or macro, and regardless of the action. She asks how it affects the relationship between two people, and whether or not it creates a domino effect reverberating within the entire community. Rather than penning a series of answers, she gathers her defective wooden chairs and puts them all back together with acrylic, as if she meant to imply that two or more differences may give birth to wonder.

Even before her show at Guy Hepner Editions, Tatiane Freitas had long started her ‘kintsugi’ series. In her ‘My Old New’ anthology, the very first acrylic chair she created dates back to 2010. It has been over a decade now that she has been joining defective objects with acrylic. Instead of using gold, which is typically used for the Japanese tradition of mending or putting things back together, she chooses acrylic, and its transparent materiality makes it feel as if viewers can see through her, the sculptures, and what hides behind the in-between.

My Old New Chair 5, 2019

My Old New Chair 7, 2019

My Old New Chair 2, 2016

My Old New Table, 2019