"Sailing in the headwinds of the phenomenally successful sale that was The Shipping earlier in 2021, Reisinger ventures further into the physical/digital (‘phygital’) terrain he is beginning to master. Taking the name of the original epic narrative, Homer’s Odyssey, this installation at Nina Yashar’s Nilufar Depot on the occasion of Milan Design Week is the artist’s most ambitious
and coherent yet. The protagonists of this version of the Greek legend are three wildly distinct ‘furniture objects’ or sculptures, each with an accompanying digitally-rendered version of itself, set against an imagined landscape.
Writing about Odyssey, American art critic Glenn Adamson describes a “degree of formal indeterminacy” that is uncommon in furniture design. This kind of ambiguity, he points out, is “the norm online, where open-source, user-populated platforms are the defining form”. And so, we can see Reisinger’s Complicated Sofa as a product of that very digital sphere. Complex, yet bafflingly simple, flexible and practical, yet slightly absurd, the sofa does not adhere to typical design considerations of form and function. “Reisinger’s objects might best be seen as decoys,” argues Adamson “which lure us into a complex situation of his devising”.
Certainly, these devices coax the viewer into the uncharted realms the artist has created. Passing the menacing, sea monster-like Complicated Sofa, the journey continues before reaching the alluring Bold Chair. Eminently satisfying in form, the piece is enticing, the soft grasses brushing at its feet almost hypnotic. But perhaps this too is another trap? Bold Chair after all, looks far too good to be true. Crowded Elevator offers a demonstrably more dystopian scenario, this time the inspiration coming from Reisinger's imagining of a lost civilization. Here the landscape is as cold and inhospitable as Bold Chair’s setting is warm and inviting."