When Florence Chernakhovsky He traveled to Paris to study Letters at the Sorbonne, he always thought of returning. Despite the fact that her parents were always very close to art, that universe had not yet unfolded for her until her revelation came: crossovers had to be explored. In that very fine limit between different disciplines there was another place where art is inhabited with the body.
After completing a Master’s Degree in Art History and a postgraduate degree in Social Sciences, he began working at the Pompidou Center, where after a long journey he began to fantasize about a multicultural project that is now a reality. The moneysuch is its name, celebrates a union between crafts and great Argentine plastic artists.
While planning to settle permanently in Buenos Aires, Florencia receives NOTICIAS in her exquisite showroom in San Cristóbal to talk about prejudices in the art world, cultural rescue, a family legacy and answer the million dollar question: does Argentine art sell?
News: Let’s start with a question that I suspect is more conceptual than obvious. Why is your business called Lalana?
Florence Chernakhovsky: I like that the name is obvious because it refers to the materiality with which I work and it also seems to me that in that set of letters is the concept, which is Argentine Applied Arts. Lalana is a synergy between art, design and crafts with a strong national imprint, it tried from the beginning to ennoble this great tradition of decorative arts. My idea was to undertake a multidisciplinary project. Lalana explores the links between art and design, highlighting Argentine elements.
News: And to link those concepts, did you think that the wool spoke of our artisan DNA?
Chernakhovsky: Totally, wool here is a very important raw material, we are one of the largest exporters in the world and for my production in the Argentine Northwest I decided to work mainly with llama wool, which is an autochthonous camelid from South America. I wanted to rescue local craft traditions and create a dialogue with other forms of art. That is why I curated a catalog of Argentine visual artists, some deceased and others alive, with a lot of emphasis on the sixties, which is the golden decade of interdisciplinary artists, here for example with the Di Tella generation, many of them like Juan Stoppani, David Lamelas or Delia Cancela are part of the Lalana catalogue.
News: Argentina had a very interesting move in terms of textile art that gradually dissipated, why were you interested in going back there?
Chernakhovsky: In the mid-fifties there was a first great antecedent of the encounter between art and design called “Good design for the industry” which consisted of a textile industrialist named Soifer commissioning artists such as Sarah Grillo or Fernández Muro to make designs for the textile industry. applied to sheets, curtains… I was fascinated to recover that legacy. All my pieces are unique because they are completely handmade, no two rugs or tapestries are the same. My idea is that Lalana Rugs and Lalana Objects exist, among the design objects I started with a chair based on a watercolor by Luis Fernando Benedit that I made for the first time as furniture. They were two years of work since I started with the prototype, previous research in industrial design to achieve the final product. Now that chair is exhibited at MALBA together with the original watercolor
News: Your objects are a hybrid between a piece and a product, they are collectible, portable and, above all, they are the antithesis of what we see in museums where the work cannot be touched. Do you believe in a more sensory and utilitarian art?
Chernakhovsky: I always wanted my works to have another aura and not to be minor versions of the original. The utilitarian art has a functionality and it is not a traditional work with which in general you maintain a distance and a more static frontal link. I was interested in moving from the two-dimensional to a super tactile piece where the textures invite a much more intimate relationship with the work, being able to inhabit the piece, sit on it, step on it barefoot, put things on it, activate it. They are absolutely handmade with different weaving techniques so that they can be lived not for the body but to dress the house.
News: If we learned something with the pandemic, it is that it is not a small thing to be at home…
Chernakhovsky: Totally, and I also wanted to do something first class. I traveled many places in the country, I was making a selection of suppliers. I work in Salta, where the weavers use very large looms, and in Catamarca, the only place in Argentina that makes hand-knotted rugs in a public factory. The production rate is very slow, we have had a rug in the works for more than two years, imagine. That is why I made my thinking more flexible and began to make a mix with a second production pole in Morocco and Nepal.
News: Does Argentine art sell abroad?
Chernakhovsky: You always have to continue working on this topic because an ecosystem that brings together artists, gallery owners and collectors is required. Not much is sold abroad, the market is much stronger locally. There are figures who sell barbaric abroad but they are few, some very established like Julio Le Parc, Marta Minujín, others brilliant like Adrián Villar Rojas, Tomás Saraceno and now Gabriel Chaile who had a very important presence at the Venice Biennale.
News: The film director Luca Guadagnino was recently in Argentina. He came as an architect and decorator and there was much criticism that instead of visiting us to present his film “Hasta los huesos” he came “to show vases to a group of ladies.” Do you think that decoration is underestimated?
Cherñakhovsky: Absolutely, there was always a certain contemptuous attitude, which in my opinion is a super archaic classification of high art and low art. From contemporary art today, figures such as Ettore Sottsass are being valued a lot, to whom exhibitions dedicated to the Visual Arts and not only to furniture are made. Sottsass was a guy who worked for big industrial brands like Alessi, but also all the best suppliers in Italy approached him with noble materials for his works. The division between minor and major arts has been around for a long time and it comes from prejudice and is outdated, but I recognize that in the art world there is still a snobbery towards design that persists. That is why I was interested in working with artists who do not consider this project as a bastardization of a sacred work, but who see the richness of experimenting with other materials and a different link with the image.
News: Speaking of these diverse links with the image, you are the sister of the clothing designer María Cher, someone who is also interested in the intersection between the arts. Do they discuss this topic at family meals?
Chernakhovsky: (laughs) We talk a lot! My brother also trained as an architect and is interested in starting to think about objects made with molded pulp, art is a family theme. With María we have many tastes in common, there is an affinity of interests, I share everything I see with her, when we are together we go to some exhibition and in general we are attracted to the same thing. Our father is a businessman (Rubén Cherñajovsky, founder of Newsan). but he always loved art, fashion and architecture. In our house there were many artist friends, we sucked at that since we were girls and we shared many things. Also, of course 90% of the clothes I wear are Cher! (laughs)
News: At the time you made the decision to return to Argentina and go back to your roots. Currently, the Lalana showroom is in the same building as the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, an institution very close to the history of our country.
Chernakhovsky: It wasn’t intentional, but I wanted to settle in a real neighborhood, in a period building. But now that you mention it, it seems to me that there is something of the legacy and of the preservation of memory in this kind of coincidence. Rescuing our history and sharing this building seems to me a nice echo with Abuelas.
