Imagining the office of an intellectual from the beginning of the 20th century will probably lead us to visualize a room lined with dark wood, with leather armchairs and an embossed silver writing desk on the desk, but the office of the writer Ramón Gómez de la Serna is located in the antipodes of that aesthetic. Looking into the microworld that he himself created is possible today thanks to the faithful reconstruction of his office that is located in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Madrid, in the facilities of the Condeduque Center.
What we see there, between windows that remove the temptation to touch Ramón’s private universe – that’s what he wanted to be called, without last names – is a collage of what was his office in various parts of the world: in his neighborhood home de Balvanera in Buenos Aires, where he shared a house and life with Luisa Sofovich, in his lair on Velázquez street in Madrid, nicknamed “El Torreón” and today the headquarters of the luxurious Wellington hotel, or in his other Madrid offices on the streets of Puebla , Maria de Molina and Villanueva. The Ramonian portable museum came to Madrid to stay in 1968, donated by his widow, and after a tour of various spaces, it was installed in its current headquarters in 2015.
When looking at it, our eyes immediately go to its cerulean blue ceiling, from which hang several spheres lined with little mirrors, which today we usually call “disco balls”. Its walls upholstered with prints and photographs are also a trademark of the house: this fondness for visual vacui horror was acquired from his grandmother, who pasted on the walls of her room the prints that were given away in packages of chocolate and others that she obtained in stores. various. “
“There I learned my hobby of filling the walls of the houses I live in – roofs and doors also included – with all the prints that I collect in books and magazines”, declared the writer. That is why the most precise way of referring to his study is as cabinet of curiosities, because the space leaves open-mouthed anyone who feels a taste for odds and ends and beauty, that is, anyone who feels a taste for life.
No one better than Ramón himself to enlighten us about the mental processes that led him to design his universe. One of his key concepts is the superposition of objects, a topic to which he dedicated words like these: “What really amazes man is to see superimposed things (…). The overlap that he achieves in constructions, in ideas, in fantasies, is what he believes makes him transcendent”.
And in this search for transcendence, he realized that his space was so full of ideas that it deserved to be part of a narrative: “I would have to write a book to describe why I surrounded myself with those things of character that I found in the corners picturesque of the world; that Segovian clock, in which she and he look at each other eternally, moving their eyes according to the rhythm of the pendulum; that doll that goes to school with tiny steps and pizpireto (….)”.
His office could be described in a thousand ways: ornate, baroque, extravagant and even cheesy, and we would not be wrong, because some of his treasures, such as a ceramic cat with a crooked face, are part of the exhibition Elogio de lo cheesy, curated by Sergio Rubira, at the CentroCentro Cibeles (Madrid) until October 8. In his Essay on the cheesy, Gómez de la Serna distinguished between “the bad cheesy” and “the good cheesy”. Of the latter, he raises a passionate defense; before the first, instead, he proposes a strong hand, which is why he destroyed more than one “cheesy-bad” object with a hammer in his performative lectures that today we would die to see.
From this it can be deduced that Ramón was not a mere accumulator of objects, but an aesthete who, in addition to keeping his ideas in an apothecary jar under the label “Ideas”, scattered them around him emulating the most sophisticated of interior designers.
