Kishio Suga — Galerie Mendes Wood DM, Paris
Moving across different phases of the artist’s career, the exhibition Kishio Suga at Mendes Wood presents a tightly focused retrospective whose restraint and elegance pay tribute to the subtlety of a figure committed to a form of minimalism that heightens our sensitivity to the world. Within it, materials, elements and forms enter into quiet dialogue, discreetly yet decisively becoming events in themselves.
Or, as this pioneer of site specific installation has described them since the mid 1960s, “situations.” Rarely shown in France, this leading member of the Mono-ha group, and the author of a substantial body of work, is here given a thoughtful presentation that does justice to the precision and care of a practice that embraces chance with radical restraint.
With disarming simplicity and a logic whose slight displacements take on a hypnotic quality, Suga creates works that occupy space by imposing their own balance. Drawing on precariousness and subtly undermining the stability of parallel forms to generate a continuous, living movement, geometry is pushed beyond itself by the irregularities of the material it engages with.
The works shift between lightness and weight, moving through space while allowing their singular presence to resonate. Raw materials and manufactured elements, nature and culture, share a common ground: that of reality itself, which both contains and brings them together, insisting on the importance of attending to them. In flattening hierarchies and rejecting any moral symbolism, Suga develops a form of minimalism whose radicality approaches the absolute. The artistic gesture recomposes reality, making perceptible both its variability and fragility, as well as the persistence of its order, and the weight and consequence of every action within it.
Always attentive to the singularity of things, his work places material at the center, in all its complexity and in its capacity to connect with what surrounds it. For at stake is always a form of sharing, an interdependence that draws the gaze forward, toward what comes next. Freed from the sole burden of human concerns without denying them, matter reshapes an order of things which, in asserting its own necessity, may yet offer a release from the tragic.
Kishio Suga, march 26th — June 04th, Mendes Wood DM Paris, 25, place des Vosges, 75003, Paris — Tue — Sat, 11 am — 7 pm
