_Loidys Carnero & Yaima Carrazana_ Maison d’Artiste_ 12_04 / 31_05_24_Dossier

Maison d’Artiste is a collaborative project by the Cuban artists Loidys Carnero & Yaima Carrazana, and based on their lifestyle in Amsterdam, where they live and work. This lifestyle, the concrete reality they find themselves in, is filtered through their experience as emigrants and artists. Taken more broadly, Maison d’Artiste explores the intersection between painting, design, sculpture and architecture.

This project, which was curated and designed by the two artists, places great emphasis on both design and domestic life. It was produced for the first time in 2016 in Geneva, and then a year later in Havana. In each version of Maison d’Artiste, works are presented that have been conceived specifically for the given exhibition, or are just as well adaptations of existing work for each new show.

At Galería Ángeles Baños, the artists have installed a version of the 1919 Elling Buffet designed by the architect Gerrit Rietveld, which is here modified into a bar for the home. It was produced in Badajoz using the original Rietveld drawings, with local craftsmen using local materials. Further to this, the exhibition also presents a series of plywood pieces painted in oil that resemble the shapes of “drops”, those salty sweets that are highly popular in The Netherlands. These works interact with the interior of the gallery space, creating an unsettling domestic ambience.

Loidys Carnero & Yaima Carrazana share a fascination for domestic spaces, the conception of decoration and its influence on lifestyles, where the figure of the artist appears as a kind of harlequin: a character that cannot be socially integrated, represented in Maison d’Artiste through the form of the lozenge (◊) or a zigzag, shapes which recall work from the historical avantgarde, thinking specifically of Suprematism and Constructivism. In this exploration of the stereotypes of how artists live, work and socialize there is, we could say, a certain irony, a parodying of “artist myths” related to their social modes, their accursed state, drunkenness and -not to be forgotten- artistic narcissism. Maison d’Artiste is thus, in sum, a call to attention, a mirror that measures the distance between the fantasies of artistic life and its “true” realities.

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