Melancholia: Whitened Furniture Series, operates as a sustained inquiry into the socio-material conditions of memory under late modernity. Comprising one hundred items of domestic furniture uniformly painted white, the series stages a radical suspension of use, affect, and biographical specificity. The gesture of whitening is neither neutral nor merely aesthetic; it is an operation of erasure that paradoxically intensifies historical density. Within a socio-plastic framework, these objects are not isolated sculptures but nodes within a mesh of lived relations—family, labour, habit, and loss—now rendered spectral. The furniture, stripped of chromatic difference and functional immediacy, becomes a surface upon which collective time settles. Melancholia here is not romanticised introspection but a structural condition: the impossibility of fully mourning social forms that persist as residues. Lloveras mobilises the domestic as a political site, revealing how private interiors are shaped by broader regimes of production, migration, and obsolescence. The series thus resists nostalgia as sentimental recovery and instead proposes memory as a material process of whitening, slowing, and cooling. In this sense, Melancholia aligns with critical traditions from Benjamin to Bourriaud, yet departs from relational conviviality by insisting on suspension rather than interaction. The viewer encounters not invitation but delay: a refusal of immediacy that compels an ethical recalibration of attention. These objects do not remember for us; they obligate us to recognise how memory itself is socially fabricated, standardised, and eventually neutralised.
The whitening of furniture functions as a socio-plastic act that relocates meaning from depth to surface. Lloveras’ insistence on monochromy should be read as a strategy of equalisation: chairs, tables, wardrobes, and beds lose hierarchical distinction and enter a common visual economy. This levelling resonates with the logic of archives, cemeteries, and mass housing, where difference is subsumed under systemic order. Yet the series avoids minimalism’s transcendental aspirations; its surfaces are not pure but scarred by use, repair, and time. Scratches, joints, and worn edges remain legible beneath the white layer, producing a palimpsest of labour and intimacy. Within socio-plastics, such surfaces operate as interfaces between bodies and systems, revealing how everyday objects mediate power. The furniture becomes infrastructural rather than expressive, echoing theories of object-oriented ontology while remaining grounded in social critique. Importantly, the long temporal span of the project (2002–2024) transforms the series into a durational archive, one that accumulates historical pressure rather than resolving it. Each new piece is not an addition but a reinforcement of the mesh: repetition as method, persistence as resistance. The whitened furniture thus articulates a quiet form of institutional critique, addressing museums, homes, and nations alike as spaces that sanitise history through display. Lloveras exposes whitening as both conservation and violence, preservation and forgetting, aligning the domestic with broader processes of cultural neutralisation.
The notion of “back to surface,” central to the socio-plastic mesh articulated in Lloveras’ theoretical writing, finds a compelling embodiment in this series. Rather than excavating hidden narratives, the work insists that meaning already resides on the surface, distributed across textures, volumes, and spatial relations. Melancholia is produced not by loss alone but by overexposure: too much history flattened into too little form. The furniture, once relational tools, now confronts the viewer as mute witnesses to social choreography—sitting, eating, resting, waiting—interrupted. In this interruption lies the political charge of the work. The series refuses both the spectacle of ruin and the comfort of design, situating itself in an unresolved middle ground. This is where socio-plastics operates as a mesh: an interlacing of material culture, affective economies, and ideological whitening. The repetition of white across one hundred objects evokes institutional homogeneity, yet the persistence of difference undermines total absorption. Each object retains its stubborn specificity, resisting full integration into a system of sameness. The viewer navigates this tension physically and cognitively, moving through a field of near-identical forms that nonetheless refuse anonymity. The work thus stages a pedagogy of attention, training perception to detect micro-histories within standardised surfaces. In doing so, it proposes a radical ethics of looking, one attuned to the quiet violence of normalisation.
Ultimately, Melancholia: Whitened Furniture Series articulates a critical position on how societies process their own material pasts. The work does not mourn a lost authenticity but interrogates the mechanisms through which memory is institutionalised, sanitised, and rendered inert. By operating across two decades, Lloveras aligns artistic practice with long-term social observation, positioning the artist as both archivist and analyst. The socio-plastic mesh is not a metaphor but a working model: objects, spaces, and viewers co-constitute meaning through proximity and duration. Whitening emerges as a double bind—at once a strategy of care and an instrument of erasure—mirroring broader cultural policies of preservation. In this sense, the series extends beyond sculpture into the realm of critical architecture and social theory, where furniture becomes micro-architecture and domesticity a geopolitical field. The melancholia invoked is therefore not pathological but analytical: a mode of thinking that slows perception and resists closure. Lloveras’ work asks not what has been lost, but what has been rendered invisible through excessive clarity. The answer is not offered but staged, suspended across one hundred silent objects that collectively insist on the social life of surfaces and the politics embedded in their whitening.
Lloveras, A. (2017) Melancholia: Whitened Furniture Series (2002–2024), ARTNATIONS 83 FICUS, LAPIEZA 1076. Available at: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2017/03/melancholia-whitened-furniture.html
