Ester Partegàs, the intimate as a refuge

more than twenty years ago, Ester Partegas surprised with the installation of an airport waiting room in Hall of an office building. The rows of chairs stuck together and impossible to move because they are anchored to the floor and make face-to-face conversations difficult, the flower pots with plants that decorate and separate, the screens on which advertisements entertain travelers who gather at the gate boarding documents, were written on paper with great care. They were cut out and had a certain toy quality because they were much smaller in scale. It was a model that visitors could walk around looking at from above, but could not use. During this journey, he risked tripping over some of the royal suitcases that, without owners, were accumulating in the corridors.

What is carried, what is carried on the back, what is often unnecessary has overflowed. Partegàs had produced a non-place, one of those spaces that invalidate individuality, in which one ceases to be a subject and becomes merely a consumer, and which have proliferated in contemporary times, as the French anthropologist Marc Augé warned in the early 1990s. Partegàs demonstrated how small our lives have become despite the ease of the journeyDistances became shorter but this brevity also meant suffering from myopia, not looking further.

This research into contemporary spaces and the way in which our lives, reduced to consumption, develop in them, has been a constant in Partegàs' work and has given him great coherence, allowing him to anticipate many issues that today have become emergencies . Those disproportionate luggage that seem to have been left behind in the airport lounge are now, in the exhibition presented in Madrid, Solar Facade Sheltergigantic laundry baskets made of paper mache that take on architectural proportions and they become a refuge but also a threat of ruin.

For Partegàs, laundry baskets are those places where you hide what is hidden, what you want to hide, what is dirty

To accomplish them, he once again uses an accessible and popular technique, a craft, that is slow in a time that has accelerated. For Partegàs, laundry baskets are those places where you hide what you don't want to see, what you want to hide, what you get dirty, like those clothes that you carelessly put in your suitcase on the return trip, fearing that the do not open the security control and expose it to other travelers which is embarrassing.

Just like those big baskets, despite their precariousness, they are shelters, there is still a possibility that has to do with the insignificant, with what is not given due importance, so close that it cannot be seen. This is the case of the small children's stickers with shining stars, butterflies and smiling faces that support the unstable structures of pieces of bread in the designs that surround the sculptures and that speak of spaces of intimacy, privacy, home, care. build other spaces, this time places, without the no, starting from the simplest.

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