Wire: Drawer of oneself, Craft of Being

Wire: Drawer of oneself, Craft of Being
a Francisco Nuk’s exhibition

Without the intermediation of furniture and utensils, a house appears as an empty museum, without recollections, memories, or guilt. Waiting for the furniture, each with its pre-defined corner and function, the domestic space recalls an exhibition scene where every inserted object hides a story.

In drawers, portraits, passport, letters, and nostalgia. On the shelf are the marks of the altar, the candles, the stain of the glass on thirsty nights. On the doorstep, the size of the children, the passing of years. In its new forms, the furniture molds itself to the life that inhabits its surroundings.

In Lisbon, I once heard the story of a Portuguese lady who guarded the desk of her late husband, a poet. On the top of the furniture, between the grains of wood, overlapping words were engraved, a writing trace during poetry dawns.

Perhaps, the accommodation of things, the mere utility, is the smallest function of furniture. Transformed by time into memory, a mirror of our gestures, objects are marked. They fray, splinter, bend, and come to life. They act serenely as observers of our most intimate events.

In “Wire: Drawer of Oneself, Craft of Being”, by Francisco Nuk, the convenience and usefulness of the furniture are dismantled when the artist breaks its rigidity, turning the absurd into a persecuted concept. Everything in his work opens up to distorted clues. Distorted cabinets no longer balance the crystals, the drawers float lightly without the weight of archived secrets, the carefully carved circular dresser confuses those in storage.

Paulo Kassab Jr.

Francisco Nuk
(Belo Horizonte 1990)

Son of an artist and a gallery owner, Francisco Nuk was introduced and stimulated from childhood to study different artistic manifestations, from the Baroque, characteristic of his region of origin, to the contemporary, an expression produced by his parents. In adolescence he had his first contacts with fine joinery.

He spent early adulthood traveling and doing extensive studies of wood, instruments and applied techniques. Back in Brazil, he worked on the production of his father’s works and set up his own studio. During this period, he was incited to critical creativity and stimulated to produce an authorial work that manifests itself from the mixture of his Minas Gerais roots and the questions surrounding the object’s function and its imperative utility.

Rejecting utilitarianism and influenced by different currents, from Brazilian post-concretism to the conceptual art of Joseph Kusuth, Nuk’s work remodels what surrounds us, making objects part of an artistic experience. The artist arches, twists, bends the object, freeing it from its usefulness, just as poetry distorts words into images.

It is in the folds of activities considered superfluous that Francisco Nuk’s work emerges. Like the poet, he knows that giving up the unimportant, the useless, useless, can put at risk not only culture, but also imagination and the human condition itself.