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Soshi MATSUNOBE: Direction of Materials
Events
Written by KALONSNET Editor   
Published: June 18 2010

Direction of Materials (detail), 2010
paper, inkjet print, variable dimensions
2010 © Soshi Matsunobe
Courtesy Super Window Project, Kyoto.

Radical, dramatically minimalist, yet disarming and poetic, the conceptual and visual vocabulary of Soshi Matsunobe (1988) links (or blur definitions) of sculpture, drawing, installation in a same artistic, philosophical and metaphysical experience. His very first project within Super Window Project walls is the exhibition Direction of Materials, which appears to create a structuralist dialogue, and an echo, to Morgane Tschiember’s formalist projects for the gallery, Folding Space and Solid Geometry. Thus, Matsunobe extends his very own practice to resonances, drifts, associations and oppositions with historical modern and post-modern theories in order for him to explore furthermore the codes and structures of architectural archetypes and standardization processes, of spatial perception and representation, to engage the esthetic value of geometry and solid geometry, and to build possible bridges between abstraction, figuration and conceptualism.

Direction of Materials operates as an experiment that enables Matsunobe to manipulate the context of the exhibition itself. The exhibition is deliberately set as a deceptive structure, as there is nothing really to be exhibited, nothing but a production process, a work in progress, or better said a work to be processed : a table, a library/storage structure, and materials. The ensemble esthetically proceeds of the office, or the workshop environment. A place in which to examine and validate variables and available possibilities, directions in which to write multiple stories with specific objects. Hundreds of handcrafted volumes by the artist compose the only material of these specific objects : white folded paper boxes, with thin black digitally printed lines running on each side of the volumes. Individually and visually, they refer as much to op art as to architectural graphic symbolism, and build a structuralist metaphor working as a system, a grammar of signs.

The ensemble draws on the tools of formalism without adopting the theory behind them but rather connects to a zen experience. This is where Matsunobe masters to exemplifies reductivist ideas. The printed lines obviously and purposely recall the fibers, the veins of (construction) woods, or even more extensively, the parallel lines of gravels of the japanese dry gardens traditional designs, but Matsunobe’s cultural inheritance lies much more in the assertion of the invisible rules of asceticism of the shapes, of the forms, of the economy of means of production, of the balance and valorization of distances within composition, positionning and placement between the very elements of the exhibition, both in substantial terms of space and time (Ma, 間), even if intention, direction, pretention seem to have been removed from the final installation.The material just stands and wait.

For Matsunobe, this act to deceive, deny all formal activism, and is a true and silent action to disrupt and obliterate all possible direct visual and esthetic references, and the only way to enable, activate philosophical considerations of art functions and purposes. Art as a mental thing. The very occasion for Matsunobe to look simultaneously back and beyond the platonic definition for form as a collection of elements which falsely represent the thing itself and which are mediated by art and mental processes. Nevertheless, material and conceptual elements displayed and implied in the exhibition seem to point in another parallel direction, in wich representational structures must be somewhat intelligible, but yet must still aim to capture the object’s form. Matsunobe focuses on how the creation of art communicates the idea behind the art itself. He develops within the gallery context, the possibility of a playground (or battleground) in which to envisage appropriational principles and phenomena subject to interpretation, such as manipulations, experiences and/or perceptions.

Born in 1988 (Japan), Soshi Matsunobe lives and works in Kyoto (Japan). He joined Super Window Project in january 2010. Direction of Materials is the artist’s first solo show at the gallery

* The text provided by SUPER WINDOW PROJECT™ & GALLERY.


Opened dates: June 11 - August 8, 2010

Last Updated on June 11 2010
 

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