Barrio Escalante, San José

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Escuela 3, by Alexander Chaves. A traditional arched wooden cage replaces its metal wires with sharpened colored pencils.
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Alexander Chaves

Escuela 3Inquire about availability

Year
2015
Technique
Art Object
Dimensions
30 × 30 × 40 cm
Status
Inquire about availability
Palette
reddish brown, vermilion red, french blue, medium yellow, meadow green
Brushwork
Sculptural assemblage of wood and sharpened colored pencils arranged in a row.

Curatorial analysis

A traditional arched wooden cage replaces its metal wires with sharpened colored pencils. The trade-off is direct and relentless: the very tools associated with the earliest notions of childhood creativity are transformed into dense, carceral bars. In its domestic proportions, the artifact subverts early school memories, confronting the affectionate innocence of stationery with the severity of confinement.

The reddish wooden framework supports a continuous vertical rhythm. Each pencil stands tightly alongside the next in a vibrant chromatic alternation (luminous yellows, deep blues, dry greens, bright magentas) that lines the side walls, the vaulted roof, and the lower grating alike. Instead of serving as graphic instruments, the pencils become architecture, mass, and perimeter. Multiple tiers expose sharpened conical tips pointing in varying directions, introducing an unmistakable tactile sharpness. The structure not only defines an interior void, but also cautions against touching it; anyone attempting to handle the latch would encounter a prickling barrier.

Titled Escuela 3, the piece imbues this construction with an inescapable institutional reading. Normative pedagogy is metaphorized as a chromatic enclosure where the promise of creative expression ends up assembling a prison. There is a precise irony in turning the instruments of sensitive learning into bars of containment. The interior remains uninhabited, devoid of perches or feeders, suspended in an emptiness that magnifies the absence of bird or student. Only the device itself remains, a portable architecture of discipline gleaming with the deceptive cheerfulness of a freshly opened pencil box.

Escuela 3

More works by Alexander Chaves

33 works

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