Barrio Escalante, San José

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Molote, by Alexander Chaves. A dense cluster of yellow pencils hangs in the void, suspended solely by a slender metal chain that drops in a rigorous vertical line.
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Alexander Chaves

MoloteInquire about availability

Year
2015
Technique
Metal and Faber-Castell Pencil
Dimensions
30 × 10 × 10 cm
Status
Inquire about availability
Palette
mustard yellow, graphite, steel gray, old rose, light wood
Brushwork
Suspended assemblage of graphite pencils grouped and fastened by a metal chain.

Curatorial analysis

A dense cluster of yellow pencils hangs in the void, suspended solely by a slender metal chain that drops in a rigorous vertical line. Their sharpened ends point toward the ground, fanning out into a bristling cone that instantly transforms a docile school tool into a suspended, tense, and threatening artifact. The title appeals with precision to Costa Rican vernacular speech, invoking the molote as a chaotic agglomeration, a street tumult, or an entanglement where individualities dissolve into a tightly packed, confused mass.

The structure operates through an evident contrast between containment and dispersion. At the upper apex, the ferrules and worn pink erasers are forced into a suffocating coexistence, tightly bound and subordinated to the tensile pull of the metal. Toward the bottom, however, the hexagonal shafts of yellow wood yield to divergence and weight, unfurling a piercing fan of graphite. This conical silhouette evokes both the plumb-line verticality of a surveying instrument and the suspended head of a medieval flail, endowing the cluster with an unsettling gravitational energy: everything within it seems poised to drop or pierce.

A biting irony emerges from the mass repetition of the graphite pencil. As the elemental medium of drawing, intimate notation, and the construction of ideas, it is here rendered useless for mark-making by its own accumulation. The instrument of thought becomes a rigid, heavy, and potentially damaging collective body. The bright yellow lacquered wood, the barcode stamped on each shaft, and the cold sheen of the steel converse in an industrial cleanliness that clashes with the latent hostility of so many exposed tips.

By suspending this bundle in empty space, Alexander Chaves freezes a moment of rigorous physical tension. Pendular and silent, the object gauges the air with the severity of a trap about to spring, sustaining a dramatic charge where the fragility of wood contends with the inexorable pull of gravity.

Molote

More works by Alexander Chaves

33 works

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