The Empty Seat

The chair introduces a human scale without depicting a person. It is an object made to receive a body: its deformation makes that purpose perceptible even when the body is missing. Emptiness does not mean availability. A seat can be free while remaining occupied in the relationship of the person looking at it. Here absence still has an address: this seat, this height, this possibility of sitting down. The image concerns waiting and the difficulty of assigning a space anew. We do not need to know who has left. The familiarity of the object brings the paradox into everyday life.