Subject Eye

‘Tis A Gift To Be Simple

I find that I can only truly be at ease within the confines of clean and spare spaces. I find peace of mind when surrounded by, well, almost nothing. And not only do I love empty spaces, I find that I’m rather fond of very simple shapes.

I wish I could live in squalor. It must be so relaxing to not care about colors matching or whether food hits the wall or the floor when you throw the remains of a meal bits toward the trash can. You and your lounging filth will live a long and unfettered life.

I also wish I had the gene that allows you to decorate an abode with abandon. Or the gene that allows one to easily choose a toothbrush. I have to first ask myself questions like, “can I really commit to this shade of orange for three months or will these bristles clash with the striation of color in my bathroom tiles?” I guess I’m pretty high strung. I do know this. I realize I’m a Paxil cocktail with a chaser of Valium situation waiting to happen.

I take comfort when surrounded with examples of basic Euclidian geometric forms. When I recently attempted to furnish my apartment I found it very difficult. It took me a few months to see that everything I purchased was based on a square, circle or rectangle. The Marcel Wanders couch that I was so proud of was, to the eye, a perfect gathering of rectangular planes. The spines of books in the shelves and the Pablo Pardo Cortina lamp: more rectangles. Plates and bowls: circles and spheres. The Warhol silkscreen: a perfect square. Perhaps I’m ready to take over the ‘shapes’ lesson for a kindergarten class.

It may not take a lot of imagination, but it takes a lot of fortitude to maintain this sort of tight aesthetic discipline. Don’t get me wrong, I love having my things about, I just don’t want to have to see them at all. I realize that it is wonderful to be able to have things, but one needs to be wealthy enough to hire architects to make your things disappear from sight.

I used to think that it would be great to own a castle and fill it with it with all kinds of art, fine furnishings and other Regency trappings. Now I know that if you are mega rich, you may own a copious amount of choice things, but they are never all on display. The wealthy showcase a beautifully encased and extremely enormous amount of void.

Any fool with money can purchase a real Louis VXI chair, but it takes some smarts to be able to hire an architect like Zaha Hadid or Carlos Zapata to design an amazing structure for you to live in so that your chair and all the other lovely things you own can disappear.