Raul de Lara’s Rustic “Soft Sculptures” Act as Portraits of Invisible Laborers

A straw broom leans against the wall, but something is amiss: its wooden handle forms a gentle, downward-sloping arc, as if pulled by gravity toward the floor. Another broom hangs from the wall, its stick twisted over a metal peg like an earring hook fashioned by a giant.

Spades, snow shovels, pitchforks, and mops likewise droop from pegs, their ends sometimes looped through handles in impossibly pliable ways. Giving new insight to the phrase “soft sculpture,” Raul de Lara’s so-called “tired tools” anthropomorphically evoke exhausted workers. In a conversation with me, de Lara referred to them as “portraits of invisible labor,” with the absent though implied laboring bodies being those of domestic and agricultural workers, who in this country are frequently undocumented immigrants from Latin America.

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De Lara understands aspects of this population intimately; as a child he immigrated to the United States from Mexico, and remains here thanks to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) Act. (Unfortunately, DACA does not provide a pathway to citizenship, and those “dreamers” like de Lara who came to the US as children must reapply for status every two years. He has not been able to leave the country in the nearly 20 years since his arrival, for fear of not being allowed to reenter.) When he and his family arrived, they initially worked in jobs typical of the undocumented: those in food service, construction, and landscaping. De Lara’s parents having been college-educated white-collar workers, this shift to physical labor presented a somewhat rude awakening to the material properties of the tools of manual labor.

De Lara explores the inexorable relationship between work and weariness in a series he has recently undertaken, producing functional but ersatz chairs. Soft Chair (2022), for instance, is not at all soft, and its uneven legs made from stocky bark-covered branches project an inherent unsteadiness. It seems a quite rough-hewn and rustic object, except for the ostensibly plush dimpled fabric of its seat and back lovingly worked from solid live-edged slabs of elm. This trompe l’oeil cushioning pushes wood into an imagined zone of comfort, while retaining its inescapable rigid materiality.

Some of his other chair sculptures are even less welcoming, comprising hundreds of sharpened spikes that, set in pinewood stained bright green, emulate cactus spines. A few, like The Wait (2021) and The Wait (Again), 2022, are large bucket chairs on rockers; others, like Sugar and Torito (both 2021), are smaller cactus rockers, outfitted with toddler-size saddles. In For Being Left-Handed (2020), a high-backed cactus chair takes the shape of a school desk, a writing arm made of particle board attached to its left side, complete with wads of chewed gum stuck to its underside. If employed, many of de Lara’s objects would harm their users. Literally bending the possibilities of carpentry in new directions, de Lara’s work imbues woodcarving, that most ancient craft, with a new stake in representing conditions for people often unnoticed in the US, for whom laboring to stay in place requires a sometimes painful resilience to intense physical and mental hardship.