WCP is pleased to announce a group show by Enrico Osamu Oyama, Wiebke Leister and Silvia Lerin. Geometric abstraction is not meant to depict our everyday visual world. Instead, it can use shapes and patterns to create spaces that are both irrational and transitional.
There is a strange sense of familiarity between a place that obeys the strictest laws of geometry, and a state of frenzy and chaos of the soul where senses can be experienced, for example, in a bullfighting arena, in talisman circles a part of pentagrams painted on the ground.
Plato said that “God is always in geometry”. He established a mathematical view of nature unique to Greece that became a foundation of Western world views, while he was also a keen mystic who greatly influenced later generations. In other continents, the Russian avant-garde turned the energy of political reform into propaganda posters using geometric forms. The Japanese traditional...tearoom architecture with its simple geometric lines influenced the Bauhaus. The aesthetic revolutionary Sen no Rikyū (1522-91) is best known for perfecting the Japanese tea ceremony ritual chanoyu, by creating a tearoom that is closed off from the outside and becomes an extraordinary space where tension rises in the form of a closed microcosm.
Enrico Isamu Oyama’s artistic practice draws on 1970s and 1980s street art culture in New York. Living in New York and Tokyo, he has created countless paintings and murals, linking aerosol ‘graffiti’ culture with abstract art and Japanese tradition. He created throbbing line patterns in black and white with three-dimensional depth called Quick Turn Structure (QTS): minimal, free-flowing motifs of repetitive lines, developed from the graffiti culture.
His QTS parts resemble the ancient shapes of throwing Japanese a ninja knife, which appear in many of his work in different media.
Collaborating with StareReap printing technology by RICOH enabled Oyama’s first fully digital series SPECULA. Here, the sharp stinging shape of the movement was reduced much in size, creating a fractal mandala effect. For the series Founded Objects, Oyama has further expanded his use of different media by overlapping QTS onto the materially, conceptually and socially diverse surfaces of drawings, photos and prints found in antique shops. For FFIGURATI #461, he depicts QTS on an ukiyo-e woodcut print of a kabuki actor by the legendary Sharaku Toshusai, whose actor portraits were a sensational success in idiosyncratic Edo culture, while nothing much is known about his own identity like Banksy today.
Wiebke Leister’s interdisciplinary approach combines photography, performance and collage techniques to embody masks and facial expressions associated with Japanese Noh drama. As an artistic researcher, her work is interested in ways of translating movement and liveness into the still image.
Her 2018 project ‘Echoes & Callings’ – commissioned by Akiko Yanagisawa as a live collage performance with sound improvisation for Noh Reimagined at Kings Place, to be published later this Spring by Ma Bibliothèque (ed Sharon Kivland) - focussed on transformations of angry women into fierce demons.
Her new work ‘On Edge’ uses geometric patterns and folded paper lines with paint spray, crayon, water colour and graphite to evoke the optical illusions created by the triangle shapes and golden reflections of the snaking dance movements of the demoness Hannya, aided by multiple layers of draped kimono garments. The triangular Uroko mon pattern used on her costume represents the scales of a ferocious serpent, complemented by a face mask with a gaping mouth of merciless gold fangs and bulging eyes, a wild wig of long hair, split pants trailing behind the actor, while also holding a beating stick. A Noh actor in Dōjōji, for instance, wears a kimono made of triangular patterns derived from the scales of a serpent plays a role of a person who is suddenly possessed with rage. The kimono is an extension of the actor’s emotions, and the geometric patterns born from tradition appeal to the audience when worn by the actor, transforming from an object to an emotional artefact. Leister’s drawing visualizes this liminal space. People don’t feel the flatness and minimalism of her simply formed work. On the contrary, it is a poetic, organic and holistic experience of being embraced by being in a forest. Its oxidation effect is like watching time slowly flow and change every hour.
In her 2012 sculpture work, time stops and time is condensed. There is Lerin’s playful rhetoric here. The paperwork imitates copper, and in the copper work, the metal is folded crisply like origami and its surface is like coated paper. Her work is composed of two opposing elements that are constantly represented by yin and yang, drawing organic abstract paintings in geometry.
These three artists nurture the rhythm of ‘energy’ and ‘life’ in geometric forms, and continue to grow and expand within their images, stabilizing everything for the viewer and connecting the contradicting natural and material worlds, the present and the past and presenting the rhythm of life.
Entrada actualizada el el 22 mar de 2023
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