That elusive home. From the latest work by Florentino Díaz

This entry is a translation into English, by Teresa Álvarez Molina-Prados, of my text originally written in Spanish («Ese esquivo hogar. De la obra última de Florentino Díaz»), published in the catalogue of the exhibition Florentino Díaz. La nueva ca-sa-có-mo-da. Badajoz, Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo (MEIAC), 2025, pp. 10-21. Cf. Julio César Abad Vidal: «That elusive home. From the latest work by Florentino Díaz» (ibid., pp. 22-31).

The house. Theme and variations

With the exhibition La nueva ca-sa-có-mo-da composed almost entirely of previously unseen works created specifically for the Extremaduran and Ibero-American Museum of Contemporary Art (MEIAC), Florentino Díaz (Fresnedoso de Ibor, Cáceres, 1954) makes a clear statement about certain models of development that bind contemporary man to an increasingly incomprehensible framework, which seems to lead him to radical isolation and profound impoverishment.

The settings most dear to his creative universe are the home and the city. Microcosms and macrocosms, we might say, of the contemporary malaise of our dismantled society. Thus, for example, regarding Madrid, the city where he has lived since he was ten years old, he stated on the occasion of an exhibition he opened in the capital itself fifteen years ago: «You have to see the chaos, the disorder, the lack of security, the contempt for citizens with which most public works are carried out»¹ . However, the current exhibition, which brings together his most recent works, has temporarily abandoned the question of the city to focus intensively on his great hobbyhorse: the house.

Since his very beginnings, Florentino Díaz’s favourite iconography has been related to the house, both in its external appearance and its interior spaces, with a particular focus on domestic furniture – beds, tables, chairs and wardrobes – elements that he has approached in very different ways in his various pictorial, sculptural and photographic series and installations² over four decades.

Another notable feature of Díaz’s aesthetic language is that human beings are absent from his representations most of the time. However, when his works are inhabited, as is the case, for example, in the sculptures of his Casa de locos series, created in 2013, they do so as highly simplified figures, through laconic anthropomorphic representations that manage to convey a clear sense of discomfort and precariousness, with his characters crushed, and even buried, by a world that is incomprehensible to them. Characters who ultimately convey helplessness, structurally imprisoned by an inhuman order, and the target of the excesses of Kafkaesque institutions³. Or who live caged, too. Thus, for example, in his sculpture Donde están los otros (Where are the others, 2014, iron), Díaz has represented a park with a table, three benches and a two-seater swing. The whole ensemble is shown in an enclosure surrounded by four walls that is, visually and symbolically, a cage. There are no people. Everything is shown with extraordinary sterility, like that of a surgical scalpel.

We could interpret Florentino Díaz’s work as focusing on the physical concept of the house and the lyrical category of the home. Thus, for example, in the works that make up the series «LCDF»⁴, created in 2000 in gouache and watercolour on paper, each measuring 90 x 70 cm, Díaz proceeds to an extraordinary geometric synthesis that outlines in linear perspective the most frequent elements of his imagination: a table, a chair and a wardrobe, which can be appreciated with variations in their depth, but in which the end of one element marks the beginning of the next. The lines, with segments entirely painted in flat colours—white, yellow, and red—stand out powerfully against an entirely black background in which the perspective set seems to flourish. With the compositions inscribed on an identical parallelepiped, the series stands out for its artistic notions of similarity and difference, in a practice that is very present, for example, in certain pop serialisation strategies, and conveys an inhuman atmosphere, a rigid order. A resounding absence in a resounding, unshakeable structure. A formal and aesthetic diction shared by most of the series offered for the first time in this exhibition.

The same strategy is followed, for example, except for the white colour of all the segments and the background, which, instead of being neutral and painted as in those, is constituted by an assembly of printed fruit transport boxes in the works of the Untitled series (2001, printed wood and polyester resin, 200 x 180 x 8 cm). A uniformity of formats that eloquently reinforces this same idea of inflexible order.

Faced with uplifting dreams that he nevertheless approached, Díaz takes an «ironic» approach, in his words, critical, in our opinion. As he has also done, with determination, in relation to our country. Spain is another name for home. This, which could be considered a mere metaphor, becomes clear, if further explanation were needed, in the identification of the texts «NO PAÍS» (NO COUNTRY) and «NO CASA» (NO HOME) thatappear in capital letters in both works, identical except for the difference in those names: No casa and No país (2018, recycled fruit boxes and acrylic paint on plywood, 52 x 58 cm each). 

A Spain that he has insisted on denouncing, for example, for political corruption. Thus, for example, in Pecados españoles (Spanish Sins, 2009), Díaz has edged his assemblages with writing – a frequent practice in some of his series – surrounding the geographical silhouette of Spain with a text on the subject. Likewise, on the inside of the sculpture, he has arranged the following letters, all in lowercase. «Please excuse the permanent inconvenience and discomfort».

Florentino Díaz has often created assemblages, for which he has particularly used construction materials discarded in domestic renovations. Doors and frames abound in his work, most often integrated into sculptures. The elements of houses that are being renovated are recovered by the sculptor to return again and again to the idea of home, to its illusion, in the double sense of desire and fictional . Sometimes, this element of desire is related to dreams, a presence that is also notable in his imagination, as in the bilingual works Sueño / Dream. Two sets in which a white wooden door appears on the right and a bed base on the left, on which the words «sueño» and «dream» are transcribed in capital letters with sheep’s wool. In the same vein, a few months ago we had the opportunity to see a unique, unpublished and recent piece in his studio, made from an old iron cradle.

Florentino Díaz has gone so far as to use these waste materials to create installations. Díaz’s most ambitious work that we have experienced is an ephemeral, yet practicable and monumental piece of architecture entitled Europa: Pasajes de invierno (Europe: Winter Passages), which was presented in the old cold storage room of what used to be the municipal slaughterhouse located in Madrid’s Legazpi neighbourhood between 11 June and 30 August 2015. 

Made with walls of discarded doors and a water circuit that drips from the ceiling like leaks, it was accompanied by a reproduction of one of Friedrich Fischer-Dieskau’s versions, who recorded it phonographically on a total of five occasions, of the most defining song cycle in history: Winterreise (op. 89, D 911), a total of twenty-four compositions based on texts by Wilhelm Müller. Winterreise not only constitutes the zenith in the field of concert song, of which Schubert is the most extraordinary representative, a kind of swan song, if we may say so⁵, created in the year immediately preceding the composer’s death, a work (that of Schubert/Müller) surrounded by the idea of death, but also, Díaz’s installation – let us remember its title: Europa: Winter Passages – serves as an atmosphere, referring to Walter Benjamin’s most ambitious work, which he began in 1927 (a hundred years after Schubert’s cycle) and which his suicide in Porbou, near Girona, in 1940 left unfinished: Das Passagen-Werk (The Book of Passages). The installation includes the screening of various videos created from external and anonymous photographic records. This results in the mournful affirmation of the precariousness of our existence.

In those cases where he does not proceed with assembly practices, and from a stylistic point of view, Díaz’s sculpture can often be related, in its use of iron bars to configure structures with architectural roots, to Picasso’s concept of drawing in space in his Homenaje a Guillaume Apollinaire (Homage to Guillaume Apollinaire). When asked about this, the sculptor himself acknowledged that it has always been a work that has inspired him. In the present exhibition, this kind of spatial drawing has specific characteristics, which we will discuss below.

La nueva ca-sa-có-mo-da

The title of Florentino Díaz’s exhibition conceived for the MEIAC, La nueva ca-sa-có-mo-da, is a kind of sequel to the one he chose more than three decades ago for a solo exhibition inaugurated in Madrid, at the Emilio Navarro gallery, in 1995: Ca-sa-có-mo-da. Despite the use of different materials and the different technical characteristics of his works, it is impossible not to notice the remarkable coherence and continuity evident in our artist’s work.

The exhibition La nueva ca-sa-có-mo-da consists of sculptures (in the round and bas-reliefs) and oil paintings on paper or plywood, most of which were created specifically for the exhibition⁶ . Likewise, the various series or sub-series that make up the exhibition can be clearly distinguished by their strategies, dimensions and techniques.

Sanctuaries. Spaces for non-dwelling consists of a positive and negative diptych of a very similar structure, featuring a door (or cupboard), a chair and a table. It could not be more Franciscan, but at the same time it is presented as a solitary refuge (a single chair indicates that there is no company), and its perimeter is enclosed by a kind of wire fence, making it inviolable and inaccessible. Perhaps it is reminder that the illusion of security comes at the price of annihilating any emotional and existential openness. A house that is also a prison for its sole inhabitant.

For its part, La maison de la Liberté is a scaffolding that spatially outlines a completely unadorned living space. A parallelepiped that features, on some of the tubes that support it, segments of flat paint in the three colours of the French flag, those that hypothetically represent the values of liberté, égalité, fraternité (white, blue and red, respectively), and which served, for example, as a not-so-kind, but overwhelmingly masterful commentary by the genius Krzysztof Kieślowski (Warsaw, 1941-1996) in his film trilogy Trois couleurs⁷.

The nine works on display in the exhibition that make up Ca-sa-có-mo-da-dos (2020, oil on paper, 26 x 34 cm each) are presented on a black background that almost completely fills the pages of a planimetry book, and depict an identical house, one side of which is seen from the front, and a gabled roof that plays on the differences in the distribution of its elements: a wardrobe, a table, some chairs. The thick tabletop is painted. The chair has solid upholstery.

For their part, the eleven works that make up La nueva ca-sa-có-mo-da (2020, oil and gouache on paper, 26 x 34 cm each) offer many similarities with the works in the previous series, such as the paper used, the fact that only a few margins are left uncovered by black gouache, and the materiality of the furniture. However, the elements are not shown inside a succinct architecture of walls, let’s say transparent, but are presented in the same way as in the previous series. In terms of colour, in both series, in addition to the black that covers the paper and the white that delimits the figures, the three primary colours appear.

For a time, Florentino Díaz experimented with strategies close to the Bauhaus, in particular with references to Walter Gropius (for whom «the ultimate goal of any figurative activity is architecture⁸), Suprematism (and its search for «utilitarian perfection»⁹), or certain elements of Piet Mondrian’s Neoplasticism (that «painting of relationships with only line and colour»¹⁰), to an orderly spatial planimetry of the idea of «home». Of those mentioned, Gropius was perhaps the author to whom Díaz referred most frequently. For example, Mi casa junto a Gropius (My House Next to Gropius) was the title of his solo exhibition at the Bores & Mallo gallery in Cáceres in 2000, and he named a structure created with door frames and wooden boxes collected from the street in 2009 Gromitgoe, Mallo gallery in Cáceres in 2000, and he named a structure created with door frames and wooden boxes collected from the street in 2009 Gromitgoe, meaning Gro[pius] mit Goe[the], «Gropius with Goethe», two authors from different eras and disciplines who hypothetically converge in Weimar.

Gropius also served our artist to name one of his series, consisting of assemblages of fruit boxes (2000, 180 x 200 cm each), neatly arranged to form a mosaic—on which the fruit company’s brand name could be read—and polyester resin on which the floor plans of both buildings were drawn. However, this rationalist, economic diction¹¹ now seems, in Quevedian terms¹², to have fallen by the wayside. We draw this interpretation from the acronym (Díaz has used acronyms in their dual meaning: either creating words with the initials of others, or forming words with syllables from existing ones)¹³that gives its title to two series presented for the first time in this exhibition: VALC, which means ‘Return to the house’. We are referring to the four large-format sculptures placed directly on the floor, without pedestals¹⁴, and the four polychrome iron sculptures, to be placed on pedestals¹⁵; both sets of works were created in 2024 and form part of two series with identical titles, VALC 2.

In both cases, Florentino Díaz proceeds to create a sort of sum of profiles of domestic furniture elements, bars that are polychromed, by sections, using flat colours and which, in a sort of mirror reflection of one structure superimposed on another, seem to destabilise the very illusion of their solidity, of their habitability, even if only symbolic.

These manifestations of furniture, so complex and dynamic, differ greatly from Díaz’s famous works, from those pieces of furniture recreated in very succinct metal structures and embraced by an exact replica of their model in rubber. This is his iconic series Doble Falsedad (Double Falsehood), which he began after returning from his stay as a fellow at the Spanish Academy in Rome in 1997. A double falsehood that refers, in the sculptor’s words, «to the duplicity that most things have»¹⁶. Indeed, belonging to a community sometimes implies the need to hide a certain discomfort with established patterns. One is and is not part of the whole; not being part of it can lead to arrogance, but also to loneliness. And that loneliness is a presence that imposes itself with particular eloquence in the works that make up this exhibition.

Florentino Díaz’s work is intoxicatingly ambivalent. And we find it stimulating to see the different interpretative extremes to which a series of works can lead, starting, as we have seen, from a grammar of deliberately reduced elements. In particular, we think of the warm lyricism conveyed by the six sculptures made in 2024 in polychrome iron, to be displayed on the wall, entitled La nueva ca-sa-có-mo-da (The Korea Series)¹⁷and in the twelve works, which, in the form of bas-reliefs in polychrome plywood, make up the series created in 2020, La nueva ca-sa-có- mo-da (The Korea series). All of them are of a uniform size: 28 x 36 cm. As in other pictorial series on paper, the elements of domestic furniture (wardrobe, table, chairs and stools) are arranged in identical compositions using flat colours (white, black and the three primary colours). The uniqueness of this beautiful sculptural series, like its pictorial counterpart four years earlier, lies in the fact that the elements relate to each other, leaving empty the space not occupied by the succinct representation of the furniture.

In fact, it is possible to venture that this pictorial series was the genesis of the most recent one, from 2024, consisting of bas-reliefs to be placed on the wall. And, as is the case with all the works in this exhibition, their scenes lack any human presence. Finally, regarding the enigmatic subtitle of the works in the last two series mentioned, Díaz has named them this way because he used the packaging in which a sculpture he had exhibited at an international art fair in the South Korean city of Busan was sent to him for both series.

Coda

We believe that, in an ambivalent and somewhat cryptic way, Florentino Díaz has managed, through his work and particularly through the selection we offer here, to address some of the most important of the «thousand problems of his time», knowing nothing more than the imperative of the Dadaist approach, as Richard Huelsenbeck stated in a presentation in Berlin in April 1918¹⁸ . 

Through simple sculptural constructions and works on paper, and with reduced and deliberately limited means, Díaz raises relevant questions about the existence of contemporary man, who seems to have been born into a world increasingly dismantled in its horizons of stability and security, and exponentially isolated, atomised and precarious. But his works can also be seen, as a hope, as an invitation to companionship, as an invitation to happier occasions in which to think about ourselves and, after sharing a pleasant conversation sitting at the table, to give ourselves over to what we call our own workhorse, a fraternal embrace (Un abrazo fraterno).

1. Julio César Abad Vidal: «Trees Without a Future. A Conversation with Florentino Díaz», in Formato Cómodo Catálogo Periódico Nº. 10. Madrid, Galería Formato Cómodo, 2010. Unpaginated. ↩︎
2. Such as, for example, Hôtel de Ville, at the Barjola Museum in Gijón in 2004, about which he published a catalogue of the same name, or Winterreise, created in 2015 at Matadero Madrid, which we will refer to later. ↩︎
3. In the aforementioned interview, «Trees Without a Future: A Conversation with Florentino Díaz», published in 2010, Díaz responded to this question as follows: “Obviously. We see this helplessness every day in the news and on TV, and it almost always affects the weakest. That is why I have returned to using the human figure in my work, to highlight this defencelessness in some way and accentuate the drama of events». ↩︎
4. Acronym for «The doubly false house». ↩︎
5. Schwanengesang, or «The Swan Song» (D 957), composed in the same year of his death, 1828, is precisely the title of one of Schubert’s three song cycles, and one of the five essentials of this repertoire, along with Die schöne Müllerin, or «The Beautiful Miller Girl» (D 795), although with the particularity that it is not based on a complete cycle of poems. Like Winterreise, Die schöne Müllerin is composed entirely on texts by the poet Wilhelm Müller, twenty-four and twenty, respectively. In contrast, Schwanengesang offers a miscellaneous literary source, as it is based on different authors: Ludwig Rellstab (for the first seven songs), Heinrich Heine (the next six) and Johann Gabriel Seidl (the fourteenth and last). ↩︎
6. With the sole exceptions of Sanctuaries: Spaces for Non-Inhabiting and La maison de la Liberté. ↩︎
7. Trois couleurs: Bleu (1993), Trois couleurs: Blanc (1994), and Trois couleurs: Rouge (1994), his colossal final work. The entire trilogy shares the same screenwriters: the director himself together with Krzysztof Piesiewicz (Warsaw, 1945) – in fact, Piesiewicz collaborated with Kieślowski on the screenplays for all his films from Bez Kónca (No End, 1984) until the end of his life, with the exception of the short documentary Siedem dni w tygodniu (Seven Days a Week, 1988)—and a single composer for its memorable incidental music: Zbigniew Preisner (Slaskie, Poland, 1955). ↩︎
8. This sentence, with an exclamation mark in the original, is how Walter Gropius opens the «Programme of the State Bauhaus in Weimar» (1919). See GONZÁLEZ GARCÍA, Ángel, CALVO SERRALLER, Francisco and MARCHÁN FIZ, Simón (eds.): Escritos de arte de vanguardia 1900/1945. Madrid, Istmo, 1999, pp. 357-361. No translator listed. ↩︎
9. «Suprematist forms, as abstraction, have become utilitarian perfection». Kasimir Malevich: «Suprematism» (1920). Cf. Writings on Avant-Garde Art 1900/1945. Op. cit., pp. 295-299. The quote is taken from p. 296. No translator is listed. ↩︎
10. Piet Mondrian: «Morphology and Neoplasticism» (1930). Cf. Writings on Avant-Garde Art 1900/1945. Op. cit., pp. 270-277. The quote is from p. 270. ↩︎
11. «In Suprematism, action within a single surface or volume is achieved through a geometric relationship of economy». Kasimir Malevich: «Suprematism»; cf. Writings on Avant-Garde Art 1900/1945. Op. cit., p. 295. ↩︎
12. «I looked at the walls of my homeland, / once strong, now crumbling, / weary from the passage of time, / their courage now fading» reads the first quatrain of one of Francisco de Quevedo’s most famous sonnets. «The walls of the homeland» was, for its part, the title of the text that Fernando Huici dedicated to Díaz, published in the catalogue Propuesta 89 (Madrid, Círculo de Bellas Artes). It has been reissued in the volume Florentino Díaz. Mi casa junto a Gropius. Cáceres, Galería Bores & Mallo, 2000, pp. 35-39. ↩︎
13. Díaz likes to give his series critical titles, often creating words from other words, as in the case of the installation created in Benicasim, Castellón, in 2003, La hora de té en Kabubag (Tea Time in Kabubag), the spatial term Kabubag being a symbolic space whose name combines the initial syllables of Kabul, Guantánamo and Baghdad. ↩︎
14. Its dimensions are: 178 x 314 x 87 cm, 210 x 312 x 87 cm, 184 x 270 x 81 cm, and 200 x 283 x 92 cm. ↩︎
15. Its dimensions are 27 x 80 x 46.5 cm, 44 x 67 x 19 cm, 21 x 67.5 x 50 cm, and 11.5 x 73.5 x 53.5 cm. ↩︎
16. Statements made to the author in the sculptor’s studio on 23 October 2024. ↩︎
17. Its dimensions are 36 x 53.5 cm, 37.5 x 49.5 cm, 41 x 38 cm, 37.5 x 39.5 cm, 37.5 x 47.5 cm, and 36.5 x 53.5 cm. ↩︎
18. «The best art will be that which, in its conscious content, presents the thousand problems of its time» [Richard Huelsenbeck]: «Berlin Dadaist Manifesto», in Writings on Avant-Garde Art 1900/1945. Op. cit., pp. 205-207 (translator not listed). The quote is from p. 205. The manifesto would be published as Dada-Almanach in the same city two years later, the same year that the movement would disappear. For other texts by the author (in which the manifesto does not appear, however), see HUELSENBECK, Richard: En Avant Dada. The Berlin Dada Club. Translated by Horst Rosenberger. Barcelona, Alikornio, 1999. See also HUELSENBECK, Richard: En avant dada. Die Geschichte des Dadaismus. Hannover, Paul Steegemann Verlag, 1920.
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