It’s a simple plastic chair, usually blue or white. The Monobloc is so widespread, so ordinary, that it almost goes unnoticed. Kuril Chto knows this well — the Russian artist who now works between Lisbon and New York has made the Monobloc the muse of many of his works. “The first time I consciously noticed it,” he told Domus, “I was at the seaside near Lucca, where I lived for a while. I saw a Monobloc abandoned on the beach. Soon after, a man arrived, sat on it, and started looking at the sea. I noticed he did the same thing — coming to sit on the Monobloc — every early morning. So I thought it must be an important object for observing, or for expressing some kind of feeling of nostalgia.”

From that moment on, the Monobloc became almost an obsession: Chto photographs it, sculpts it, reproduces it, and exhibits it in different colors and materials — and above all at any scale, from just a few centimeters to dozens of meters. “It’s very interesting that it’s something we take so much for granted. It’s just a chair, and it’s everywhere. I think these everyday objects might explain our lives better than some objects we instead consider more unusual, specific, or special.”

Anyone who lives in Italy — or has spent time there, like Chto — is used to seeing it outside bars or small neighborhood restaurants, associating it with a summer imagery made of hill towns and ice cream by the seaside. But the Monobloc is much more than that. As the name suggests, it is a single block of plastic, easy to stack and inexpensive. This has made it one of the cheapest and most widespread objects in the world: if you live on planet Earth, you have probably sat on a Monobloc chair at least once.

The artist is fascinated precisely by the chair’s ubiquity, its omnipresence across the planet’s surface, and the implications of hospitality that this simple piece of furniture offers. “Through the Monobloc, I study and learn about the world, reflecting on what is happening.”

In Chto’s practice, everyday objects are the ones that hold special meaning: “I think objects have a privilege. It seems to me that, if God exists, He gave objects more time to exist than people. I think that’s a rather interesting privilege they have: they see more of our lives than we see of theirs.” 

The result, in the venues where he exhibits — such as in Venice in the show Under Jove’s Protection — is an ode to the everyday poetry of the simplest and most familiar objects. The kind of objects that, in a world increasingly marked by instability and displacement, are and remain at home wherever they are.