Keita Mori — Ito no ito — Catherine Putman Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 14 → October 26, 2024

The gallery is pleased to present a new solo exhibition by Keita Mori, «Ito no ito.»

Born in northern Japan in 1983, Keita Mori graduated in art from Tama Art University in Tokyo. He continued his studies in Paris at ENSBA in 2005 and then in 2009 for a master’s degree in Fine Arts at Paris VIII University. He settled in France in 2011, where he developed a unique body of work consisting exclusively of drawings made with threads, stretched and glued on paper or directly onto walls.

Keita Mori’s works, which he generically terms «Bug report,» are improvised and feature certain recurring formal elements named «circuit,» «flow,» «Potemkin stairs,» etc., with no preliminary pencil work. Although his technique and the precision with which he draws his lines initially captivate the observer, it is the accidents, the unexpected details, that create all the poetry.

«Finding the right form does not only come from conceptual intelligence but from a true poetics of drawing. The simplicity and refinement of his technique stem from an economy of means, manifested in the virtuosic choreography of his gestures where cotton, linen, silk, wool, or nylon threads, glue guns, and cutters orchestrate the emergence of a drawing. There is an intimacy in the drawing through the simultaneous movement of his hands and the shift of his eyes.» Pascal Neveux*

For the title of his new exhibition at the gallery, Keita Mori chose a phrase in
Japanese using the literary device of antanaclasis, the repetition of a word with two different meanings. «Ito no ito,» translated into English as «thread design.»

This is not the first time he has used this figure of speech to name an exhibition, and it is quite coherent because in his works, systems, architecture, rhizomes, electronic circuits, and forms of writing are themselves polysemous. His abstract lines, like certain words, invite us to various possible readings.

Keita Mori plays with words across different languages. «Ito» means « design » : His drawings are intentions, spontaneous lines that lead us from one point to another by creating space on a flat surface. «Ito» also means thread, which is Keita Mori’s drawing tool. In a single word, the artist conveys the essence of his work.

In the exhibition, the drawing unfolds on several scales, on Arches paper, a medium he loves, in small and large formats, as well as in situ for an ephemeral and monumental installation created directly on the gallery walls. Threads of cotton, silk, wool, or rope accumulate, cross, form straight lines, circles, and ellipses. While ultramarine blue has long dominated his palette, a significant variety of colors appears, and new patterns emerge through experimentation.

For more than ten years, Keita Mori has obsessively created thread works with this exclusive and personal technique that he continues to evolve. Like a language, his drawing has enriched and developed over time, and like Esperanto, it crosses borders. His graphic universe is exhibited in Europe as well as in Japan

*Excerpt from «Keita Mori, metaphoric horizons,» published in March 2023 in the artist’s catalog
by Résidence Saint-Ange. Pascal Neveux is the director of the Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain
de Picardie Hauts-de-France.

Born in 1981 in Hokkaido, Japan, Keita Mori lives and works in Paris. After studying at Tama ArtUniversity (Tokyo), he completed his training with a Master’s degree from Paris VIII University and at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, under the sponsorship of the Agency for Cultural Affairs (Bunka-cho).A solo exhibition at the Drawing Lab Paris in 2017 was dedicated to him for the center opening. He has participated in numerous exhibitions, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo; National Art Center, Tokyo; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg; Aomori Contemporary Art Center, Aomori, Japan. His works are part of several private and public collections, including «1 immeuble, 1 oeuvre» under the aegis of the Ministry of Culture and the Fonds de dotation Emerige, Massy; FRAC Sud, Marseille; FRAC Nouvelle-Aquitaine MÉCA, Bordeaux, and FRAC Picardie.