MARCELO KRASILCIC'S CUSHION/PILLOWS IN PURPLE MAGAZINE

Long-time Purple collaborator, Brazilian photographer Marcleo Krasilcis is, at home, a sculptor, who combines comfort and interior design in a new mobile art form.
Purple Fashion Magazine Summer 2007

In Marcelo’s loft in China Town in New York, there is a sofa and a light blue carpet and a white wooden floor with the paint scraping out, there is also a column and great old iron walls with an early XX century design. If you are familiar with Marcelo’s work, I guess you’ve seen some of these elements in his photos. Most of them participate in the photos as a background, with a silent presence almost as important to the naked bodies he shoots. Next to Marcelo’s sofa, there is a pile of cushions covered with a orange-brown zigzag seventies’ style fabric. In different occasions I’ve been to Marcelo’s house, the cushions have had different uses. In parties and screenings they serve as cushions where people can sit on the floor, sometimes when I’ve been drunk and stayed over I’ve made a bed with them and slept over them, I haven’t had sex in them yet, but I guess if they could speak they could tell great stories. The cushions are sometimes just piled to the side, as a tower or column, with one of Marcelo’s cat’s Rio or Rey on top of them. Over the last year Marcelo has been conducting a series of social experiments with the cushions which he calls pillows. “A pillow is a cushion without a sofa” he says. For it, he has invited friends to use the “pillows” in the way they think is more appropriate. The results range from the friendly, to the religious, to the sexual, becoming a users manual for the pillow/cushions: Brian covered with the pillows in a way it reminds of a crucified Christ, Renata giving birth to a pillow, JJ taking a pillows for a walk or then using a pile of pillow to have the right height to get a blow job, or a modernist house for the cats. I guess that liberating the cushions from the structure of the sofa, gives them a new freedom, from new sitting arrangements to sculptural forms to social and sexual uses. The cushion-pillows have also a family history within them, Marcelo’s mother used to be an interior designer in Sao Paulo, while his grandparents were furniture designers. Marcelo is now continuing the tradition, creating new editions of pillow-sculptures which can be covered with different fabrics, some vintage, some made by his friend Favio in Sao Paulo. The cushion-pillows can then be used by the new owners as social sculptures or ever changing sofas or playthings, with the users manual just giving some possible ideas of the possible situations to be experienced in them.