In the Apollonia Dining Room, the artworks serve as poetic contours, waxing and waning with a kind of experiential spiritualism as one revolves around the space. Their synchronicity with the room’s furnishings and other design elements is unorthodox, almost coincidentally psychic and perhaps even somewhat inexplicable. Yet the coalescence is palpable, invigorating the space and its guests with a generative energy.
Commanding the room, Alex Prager’s surreal Untitled (Parts 1) exudes a mood of mystery. The stylized large-scale work emanates a thrilling seductiveness, alluding to the intrigues within its dominion. Prager’s seductively ambiguous scenes are weighted with the uneasy expectation of impending danger, proffering strange pictures of perfection with a creeping eeriness. Taking aesthetic cues from film, fashion photography, pulp fiction, and the city of Los Angeles, her photographs hint at the dark, unsettling undercurrents beneath the surface of beauty and promise.
Chroma reflects on the role of art curation in making spaces emotional, corporeal experiences through the prism of the studio’s intricately layered Apollonia Dining Room for San Francisco Decorator Showcase 2023.
The references we make in our spaces always return to the mythos and pathos of artistry, with special affinity for those who dare to tease the tears in the monotony of convention. We view art as a seductive medium with the potential to stimulate emotion, contemplation, and intimate exchange—and thus, something with extraordinary transformative power.
The artworks in our interiors are not final flourishes. They are essential equations in the composition—equal parts harmony and dischord—sourced specifically from local curators, gallerists, and artists to not only resonate emotionally or intellectually with our clients and lend their home a cool, unique quality, but to boldly reverberate a creative vibrance that can be physically felt throughout the space.
In his multidisciplinary practice, Sebastian Errazuriz blurs the boundaries between contemporary art, design, craft, and technology. Always surprising and compelling, his original and provocative works invite the viewer to look again at realities that were often hidden in plain sight. In the Apollonia Dining Room, Errazuriz’s Porcupine Cabinet perplexes the mind, deliriously satisfying with its myriad, unwieldy yet enticing dimensions.
Ensconced on a custom hand-turned mahogany pedestal by The Long Confidence, Roger Herman’s Untitled 122 cooly radiates an unbridled potency that speaks to the Apollonia’s sensate mystique. With their gestural rawness and spontaneous vibrancy, Herman’s ceramics harmonize a cacophony of styles. Drips of paint run down the exterior of the hefty vessels, which are sharply cut with irregular sides and surfaces and freckled with nubs of glaze that lend the forms a haptic sensuality.
Whether stretched onto shaped wooden frames or draped over planks and rods, Liam Everett’s heavily worked compositions are abundant with human traces and tension between their ethereal abstraction and the physicality of their making. With its bold strokes of color and gestural application of both accumulation and erasure, Everett’s Untitled (the smoke the feather the bones) strikes a similar juxtapositional balance accomplished throughout the space.
