TRACES OF LIFE
Koro Ihara
5.10 — 7.12.2024
Inauguration Saturday 5 October 10.00-21.00 Saturday 5 October the FABER art gallery presents the personal exhibition Tracce di vita by Koro Ihara. The Tracce di vita project proposes for the first time in Italy the intense research of the young but already established Japanese sculptor Koro Ihara, through monographic exhibitions, installations and talks. Koro Ihara's art is the narration of an exploratory journey that leads to a series of questions with ancestral references: from reflection on nature and the life cycle to the attempt, through the sculptural gesture, to bring out the cultural values ​​that organisms do not humans intrinsically possess. Therefore in the Tracce di vita project the hottest topics of the global environmental debate, climate and geological change, sustainability, guide, but do not exhaust, a study aimed at extrapolating a new idea of ​​sculpture. Ihara's entire production, pervaded by a rigorous conceptual coherence, can be conceived in some main series, to be understood as stages of the journey in the footsteps of life (fading-cycling-made in ground-dyeing-nestedbooking-still life); in each expressive cycle the tracks to follow change and, consequently, the materials to be used change. The Japanese sculptor maintains a visceral relationship with the elements, he probes and exploits their various potentialities, mixing substances of all kinds in daring experiments. While using a very vast range of materials, from the most canonical ones such as metals, silk, terracotta, ceramics, to organic, biological or living ones and using traditional and experimental techniques, Koro Ihara's analysis presents itself as a unitary observation of nature, life, autonomy and perfection of evolutionary paths and man's destabilizing intervention. In this way the works, pervaded by a latent empiricism, combined with rigorous technical control, manifest an aesthetic that is as primordial as it is poetic and refined which enhances the underlying investigation. “I look for traces of life and by-products of living creatures and with these I create sculptures using traditional techniques. Concretely, for example, I use lacquer to harden animal dung and bring it back to the physical form that gave rise to the excretion, or I consider swallow's nests and heaps of humus generated by worms as sculptures created by animals and transform them into ceramic works or terracotta. In some "in ground" works I exploit the forms shaped by animal intelligence and mix them with human methods and functions; moving back and forth between different human and other creature perspectives I experience new possibilities for sculpture. In recent years I have conducted research on "photosynthesizing paper", reacting a mixture of cyanobacteria, called "ishikurage", with "kozo", a vegetable which constitutes the raw material of Japanese paper. The works created with this paper breathe and photosynthesize depending on the environment, while maintaining their essence as works of art. In this way not only being, but also sculpture lives and changes. In my creations I interact with nature with the utmost respect; the meaning of my research is not to use organisms as tools, but to understand them, understand life and respect its path. Through living traces I want to explore new experiences and opportunities that nature often hides in its flow, instead of focusing on the act of taming it, based on the assumption of a hierarchy in which man is at the top. I wonder if the traces of life that we can see and that become sculptures can really be considered works of art on a par with man's creations and if this is the case, as I believe, I ask you: is it possible to think that non-human organisms are repositories of culture? "
edited by Cristian Porretta
dal 5 ottobre al 7 dicembre 2024 galleria d'arte FABER martedì-sabato 10: 00-19: 00 domenica su appuntamento via dei Banchi Vecchi 31,00186 Roma tel 06 68808624 galleriadartefaber. Com info@galleriadartefaber. Com