Los Carpinteros at Sean Kelly

Art in America, June-July, 2008 by Brian Boucher

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"A household item shows who you are," Marco Castillo, of the duo Los Carpinteros, told a Cincinnati reporter on the occasion of a 2006 exhibition there. If so, many sculptures by this Havana-based pair (Castillo and Dagoberto Rodriguez), which are often based on such items, might leave observers puzzled. Previous works include a couch with a stove embedded in it (talk about a hot seat!) and a hand grenade outfitted with drawers (it either pacifies the warlike or makes furniture threatening).

In two of three sculptures in their latest New York show, their first at Sean Kelly, they toyed with miniaturization. Home-Pool (2006) is a freestanding fiberglass-and-steel swimming pool, standing about 3 feet high and roughly 8 feet on a side, complete with ladders, shallow and deep ends, underwater lights, a pump and tiny blue tiles the size of my pinky nail. Its shape is like a half-ziggurat turned on its side, and the underwater area is divided into a number of rooms. Its small scale suggests a joke about taming the already familiar, but in the context of Cuba's history it symbolizes domesticating the exotic: swimming pools were the kind of extravagance familiar only to the rich until the revolution, when the poor reclaimed many of the opulent estates that boasted them.

Estanteria I, II and III (all 2008) are bookshelves of plywood with maple veneer, each 6 feet high by 10 feet long. The fine wood craftsmanship suggests how the artist team got its name (Carpenters, in English). The shelves' sleek blond look would seem straight out of an Ikea catalogue but for wild distortions of their rectilinear design: shelves suddenly curve as though viewed through a convex lens, or as if a cannonball had been shot through them or dropped on top of them and the wood, gone cartoon rubbery, had bent in response to the impact. At 750 pounds each, they reside somewhere between furniture and architecture, and you can't help but wonder what kind of custom-designed books would fit them.

In Kelly's large back room loomed La Montana Rusa (2008), an 8-by-26-by-14-foot combination of a gargantuan bed and a downscaled roller coaster (known in Spanish as a "Russian mountain" due to the ride's Russian origins). It has the familiar hills and valleys, twists and turns, but where there should be rails, there is a pink-upholstered mattress, and rather than describing a full loop, the track is broken by a footboard and a headboard (with pillow); between the two is a gap that allows viewers to enter the sculpture's interior. The reference to Russia slyly evokes Cuba's history with the Soviet Union. The allusion to sleep, along with the absurd combination of furniture and amusement-park ride, calls to mind the bizarre conjunctions of the dream world. For me, the sofa-like mattress also suggested the psychiatrist's couch and the sometimes wild ride of "the 50-minute hour."