calendario eventi  :: 

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17/3/2005

Rinko Kawauchi / Adriana Varejao

Fondation Cartier, Paris

Rinko Kawauchi
AILA the eyes, the ears cui cui

Rinko Kawauchi, one of the most celebrated young photographers in Japan today, presents her first solo exhibition in Europe at the Fondation Cartier pour l art contemporain. For this exceptional event, the artist has chosen to show a large selection of photographs from the AILA series (2004) and exhibit for the first time to the public her two most recent series: cui cui and the eyes, the ears.

Rinko Kawauchi captures with her camera the details of everyday life that are all too easily missed by the busy passer-by a faucet dripping water, the crack in a watermelon, a spoon full of tapioca. Seen through the wellattuned eyes of the artist, these ordinary objects and occurrences take on another character; they become charged with beauty, poetry and emotion. Kawauchi assembles her photographs in sequences, creating subtle, open-ended narratives that she publishes in the form of books. Juxtaposing her images in a way that reveals unexpected conflations of forms, moods or atmospheres, she encourages us to engage with the infinite wonders of the world.

Consisting primarily of images of nature, the photographs from AILA (from the Turkish word aile meaning family ), published in 2004, celebrate the awe-inspiring essence of life. Kawauchi captures the limitless diversity of nature hives of insects, matrices of fish eggs, dewdrops, waterfalls, rainbows while emphasizing the limited time all creatures have on earth. Animals, plants and humans are all depicted at various stages of transition from birth to death.

As the title suggests, it is the shared experience of being alive that brings all living creatures closer together and binds our global family. Kawauchi is successful in conveying these layered relationships by utilizing images that both imply and literally depict humankind s interaction with animals and nature: a hand holding a newborn puppy, a park visitor feeding crows. We are also reminded of the remarkable likeness man shares with other living things. Some groupings point out physical similarities in form, such as an image of an umbilical cord and placenta, paired with a photo of an insect that has sprouted a long winding growth from its body. Others compare man-made, constructed environments with natural ones. One such juxtaposition brings together the image of a glass window with that of a tortoise swimming in the ocean, the light shimmering beautifully through each of these translucent surfaces.

Although AILA is an overwhelmingly life-affirming visual statement, some of the subjects depicted in this series also reveal the cruelty, pain and death inherent in existence. One particularly striking image shows a slaughtered chicken with its head hanging over the chopping block. But whether they represent a moment of birth or of death, the images of Rinko Kawauchi are both beautiful and unsettling. She achieves this effect by combining a highly-refined language of pastel colors and patterned light with a powerfully direct snapshot approach to photographing. Tuned in to the subtlest details of her immediate surroundings, Rinko Kawauchi succeeds in showing us the beauty that can be found in the transience and uncertainty of our daily lives.

Rinko Kawauchi s series of works, cui cui, continues to explore the theme of the family, but this time on a more intimate level. Presented in the exhibition in the form of a slide show, this body of work consists of images of the artist s family and the places she associates with them, taken over a period of ten years. The title of the series comes from the cry of small birds or sparrows, highly sociable creatures who tend to stick together in groups. The soft, sweet song of the sparrow thus becomes a metaphor for the close connection that binds family members together. Focussing on expressive details and melancholy landscapes, these photographs, at times bittersweet and nostalgic, evoke the passing of time and the continuity of life.

Accompanied by a series of poems written by the artist, the photographs from the series the eyes, the ears evoke the exquisite and intriguing sights and sounds captured by the senses: the iridescent forms of nature as seen through a kaleidoscope, the surprising formation of dewdrops on leaves. The images are lyrical, even musical in the sounds they recall: the fluttering of butterfly wings, the splashing of waves, the dripping of water. In this series, the artist finds an echo of her inner voice in the soft murmurs she perceives in the world around her.

Born in the Shiga prefecture in 1972, Rinko Kawauchi discovered photography during her studies at the Seian Junior College of Art and Design. In 2001 she simultaneously released three photography books with Little More publications: Utatane [catnap], Hanabi [fireworks], and Hanako, creating an overnight sensation in the photography world. In 2002, she was awarded the prestigious 27th Annual Kimura Ihei Award for her work in Utatane and Hanabi. In 2004, Martin Parr included her in the Rencontres d Arles, an international photography festival. She has also worked with Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda as the photographer of his film Nobody Knows, which won the award for best actor at the 2004 Cannes film festival. AILA (2004) is her most recent publication with Little More. The eyes, the ears will be published by FOIL in January 2005 and cui cui will be released in March 2005.

Catalogue Rinko Kawauchi, the eyes, the ears
With poems by Rinko Kawauchi
Hardback, bilingual French/Japanese, 112 pages,
Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris/FOIL, Tokyo
15 x 22,4 cm, 100 color photographs approx.
Publication: January, 2005

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Adriana Varejão
Echo Chamber

Filled with references to Baroque art, the colonial history of Brazil, libertine literature and traditional Brazilian music, Adriana Varejão s artwork offers a powerful visual experience. Her lacerated paintings, ripped open to expose raw flesh, her works inspired by traditional Portuguese azulejos create a tension between painting, sculpture and architecture. For the first time in Europe, the Fondation Cartier pour l art contemporain will present, from March 18 to June 5, 2005, a major personal exhibition by this artist who stands out as one of the most original figures in contemporary Brazilian art today. The text of the exhibition catalogue Adriana Varejão, Echo Chamber will be written by Philippe Sollers.

Illusion, theatricality, monumentality, excessiveness, artifice, allegory, disguise& The works of Adriana Varejão invent a modern Baroque. In trompe l Sil, they deceive the eye and the senses. Painted canvas or ceramic? Sculpture or painting? Adriana Varejão ushers the viewer into web of references and substitutions, cites her sources in order to better subvert them. Specially created for this exhibition, Celacanto provoca maremoto [Coelacant Provokes Submarine Earthquake]1 suggests a tiled azulejo wall: a colossal, breaking wave, in the Hokusai style, moves across the ground floor of the Fondation Cartier. A profusion of churning blue-hued arabesques, an organized chaos of foam, this ensemble of 52 paintings whose crackled surface evokes the texture of Chinese celadon creates a syncopated rhythm, the visual equivalent of Brazilian choro music. Serial and modular, this kind of arrangement lends itself to experimenting with permutation and substitution. Symbolic substitution, as in Figura da Convite [Entrance Figure], 1997, a subtle marriage between the traditional genre of painted ceramic used to decorate the entrances of Portuguese and Brazilian palaces in the 18th century and engravings by Théodore de Bry (from his anthology America, 1590 1635) depicting scenes of cannibalism encountered in the New World. Substitution is again at play in Proposta para uma Catequese [Proposal for a Catechesis], 1993, which crosses the miracle of transubstantiation with an anthropophagic ritual to express the essential hybridism of Brazilian culture.

Evocative of the organic quality of Baroque buildings, the jagged outlines of the two ruins in the works Linda da Lapa and Linda do Rosário, 2004, reveal, through the broken wall fragments, strips of flesh. Inspired by a real incident the collapse of a hotel de rendez-vous in the middle of Rio de Janeiro in 2002 these monumental works produced for the exhibition are related to earlier pieces such as Parede com Incisões a la Fontana [Wall with Incisions a la Fontana], 2002, and Azulejaria Branca em carne viva [White Tilework in Live Flesh], 2002, in which the artist interrogates the substance of painting itself. In 1992, Adriana Varejão broke away from expressionist practices, opening up her canvasses, lacerating them, gouging them, letting a nether world beyond painting emerge. Flesh, both symbolic and realistic, appeared beneath the surface. A wound, sewn back up in Mapa de Lopo Homen [Map of Lopo Homen], 1992, embodiment of the sensual which makes painting an object of desire and indicates the literary background of this artist who has read Bataille and Sade.

The body fragmented, maimed, tattooed is often present in Adriana Varejão s works. In the saunas series, imposing oils on canvas that explore questions intrinsic to painting, it is alluded to metaphorically. Blue, grey, white, yellow: the saunas are basically monochromatic, but nuanced by light and shadows that bring out volumes and create a space that is labyrinthine, interiorized, virtual. Suggesting places of pleasure and sensuality that are traditionally lined with a skin of tile baths, hammans, pools as well as Carioca botequims2, these paintings are for the artist moments of pure painting, a cosa mentale.

In 2003, Adriana Varejão participated in the exhibition Yanomami, Spirit of the Forest at the Fondation Cartier. The forthcoming exhibition Echo Chamber3 embraces the many diverse facets of her work. Exploring, through her themes, the cultural identity of Brazil, she has developed a modus operandi that makes her one of the most astonishing pictorial artists on the international contemporary art scene today.

Adriana Varejão was born in 1964. She lives in Rio de Janeiro

Catalogue Adriana Varejão, Chambre d échos/Echo Chamber
Hardback, bilingual French-English, 112 pages,
Fondation Cartier pour l art contemporain, Paris/Actes Sud, Arles
22 x 28 cm, 40 color illustrations approx.
Publication: March 18, 2005
Text: Philippe Sollers
Price: 30 euros

Image: Adriana Varejao, Swimming pool, 2005

Press information Linda Chenit Tel +33 (01) 42185677 Fax +33 (01) 42185652

Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain,
261, boulevard Raspail 75014 Paris

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