Martin Boyce Same Day, 2015

Martin Boyce's Same Day initially recalls a window into a theatrical set or dark miniature parallel world. The work further emphasizes the allusion to a theatrical stage by creating inside the mantelpiece a set: on the right an opening is reminiscent of a stage door. Its cast frame refers to the shapes of French sculptors Jan and Joel Martel's concrete trees, constructed for Robert Mallet-Stevens’s Pavilion of Transport at the 1925 Exposition des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris have been an important part of Martin Boyce’s formal vocabulary since 2005. The stark verticals and horizontals of the frame double as mantelpiece and a kind of proscenium arch, that, similar to its function in a theater where it creates a “window” around the scenery, appears to flank a stage. Same Day retains the ambivalence of its function: as fireplace associated with the security of home & hearth and as enigmatic theatrical set.

Unlike Martin Boyce works which are based on common everyday objects such as outlets or ventilation grills that, because of their generality and functionality may not at first catch the spectators’ attention, Same Day embraces the more flamboyant side of modernist and late modernist design. It quotes both Carlo Mollini’s extravagant fireplace placed high on the wall, surrounded by a partially blinded mirror, as well as the fireplace installed on the rooftop of Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret’s Beistegui apartment in Paris from 1929-31. Both reference works play on paradoxical associations: Mollino pairs his ornate fireplace with a mix of modern furniture and draws attention to its artifice, while Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret’s locate the fixture associated with warmth in their chambre à ciel ouvert on the open roof garden, where its shape echoes Paris’s landmark Arc de triomphe located “behind” it.

René Magritte’s well known painting Time Transfixed (La Durée Poignardée) from 1938 is another reference point. In this painting the surrealist artist transformed the stovepipe of a coal burning stove into a charging locomotive, situating the train in a fireplace vent so that it appears to be emerging into the room from a railway tunnel.