SUPER WINDOW PROJECT IS A PRODUCTION AND DIFFUSION STRUCTURE by Super Window Project

SUPER WINDOW PROJECT IS A PRODUCTION AND DIFFUSION STRUCTURE OPERATING IN THE FIELD OF CONTEMPORARY ART SINCE DECEMBER 2007

ESCAPADE PERRINE LIEVENS 12.22.07-02.28/08

Sans titre, drawing, 2007, watercolours and graphite pencil on paper, frame, 40 x 30 cm. Unique. Private collection, Japan. Right page, exhibition view, from left to right: Sans titre, drawings, 2007, watercolours and graphite pencil on paper, 40 x 30 cm (each); A Variable Distance, installation, 2007, wood, enamel paint, polystiren, plastic balloon, helium, 57 x 50 cm x variable dimensions. Unique. Private collection, Japan; Whisper, installation, 2007, graphite pencil on silk paper, wood, mate enamel paint, fan, 24 x 14 x 0,3 cm. Unique. Previous pages: Whisper, installation, 2007, graphite pencil on silk paper, wood, mate enamel paint, fan, 24 x 14 x 0,3 cm. Unique.

Perrine Lievens sets up a strong and sophisticated visual vocabulary where forms and materials build an intricate pattern of contradictory, deep yet simple feelings. Love, loss, hope, loneliness, tenderness, anxiety, compassion. She builds objects from simple materials and uses all kinds of media such as sculpture, installation, photography, video, drawing. A balcony made of neon lights (View, 2006), a pair of feet made of salmon skin (Feet,2004), a cloud made of sugar (Temps couvert, 2005), deer woods made of soap (Woods, 2003)... they all deceive our perception and create a perverse charade that questions our humanity on an anthropomorphic and egomorphic level. Contemplation of Perrine Lievens’s artworks leads to an overwhelming feeling of vertigo. View, is a central piece of Lievens’s work. From this balcony we will never be able to contemplate what we have built, done or loved... We can only stare at its beautiful halo in the most ecstatic fascination, and feel the void under our feet. Nature, elements, landscapes are priceless figures in the universe of Lievens. She questions their presence, their durability and the nature of the relation we, humans, have built with our biotope. The installation Temps couvert lasts only four minutes before it completely melts on the floor.However the metaphorical beauty of Lievens’s artworks is as hypnotizing as its sense seems to escape a straight interpretation. As soon as we feel the grace of its strength, it reminds us that everything reaches an end. All visions of a bigger picture escape and so does the time of our lives. Days go by but still we can think of cheerful and magic moments : when we open our eyes and look at the people we love, When we breathe the air or drink water, when we touch the surface of the sea, when the sun bathes our bodies and souls... This is what Lievens’s artworks are all about. Emotions. They are gifts. They never play the loud announcement of a chaotic and apocalyptic end but a sweet, peaceful end, a nostalgic melody, just like when your favourite song  is on repeat and fades to start again... We’ll meet again, Don’t know where, don’t know when But I know will meet again some sunny day *

Escapade is an exhibition in wihich Lievens juggles with a minimal vocabulary exercising a certain sense of humour through the display of sculptures and watercolours. She offers in this exhibition a great overview of her talent and sensibility. Sharp, sensual, ironic, strong and elegant. She performs along a perfect score using the gallery space as an element of the exhibition itself with a delicate range of shades and architectural yet simple effects : thirteen drawings with a subtle nihonga inspiration (Sans Titres), a chanting column (Whisper), a capricious balloon attached to a white wall floating over a sculpture (A Variable Distance).   Each artwork has its own voice and together they form an ensemble vibrating on an emotional level, creating a unique and peaceful atmosphere inducing contemplation and meditation. They are perceived as discrete entities as they seem to hesitate on a precise definition of what they are. A series of drawings that are sketches of a possible and complex ceramic/ organic sculpture, a drawing on silk paper that reveals in fact a discreet and whispering installation and another installation that seems to hesitate between a sculpture and a scale as the shape where the wall and the balloon are floating recalls the gallery space in its proportions and colours. Metaphors at work as hesitation links the elements in a suspended equilibrium. Hesitation as a purpose.   Hesitation in making only one choice ? Or will of embracing the infinity of choices, possibilities and interpretations ? The floating balloon of A Variable Distance may be the answer. Now up... now down... now there and always here.

Escapade, is the first personal exhibition in Japan of Perrine Lievens. Perrine Lievens received the LVMH Prize in 2006 and the Hiscox Prize in 2008. She is represented by Super Window Project and the gallery Von Bartha (Basel). Born in 1981 (France), she lives and works in Paris (France).

AN EXHIBITION OF PHOTOGRAPHS GUILLAUME LEINGRE 05.10-06.27/08

QR Code, 2008, black & white, gelatin silver print, anodised aluminium frame, 46,3 x 46,3 cm. Edition 1/5 + 2AP. Right page, top, exhibition view, from left to right: Crossed Cross-word Puzzle, 2007, 16 photographs, black & white, gelatin silver print, anodised aluminium frame, variable dimensions (26,3 x 26,3 cm each); Black Disk, 2008, black & white, gelatin silver print, anodised aluminium frame,12,3 x 17,3 cm; QR Code, 2008, black & white, gelatin silver print, anodised aluminium frame, 46,3 x 46,3 cm. Edition 1/5 + 2AP. Right page, bottom, exhibition view, from left to right: 200 Circles, 2008, 13 photographs, black & white, gelatin silver print, anodised aluminium frame, variable dimensions (22,3 x 22,3 cm each); Crossed Cross-word Puzzle, 2007, 16 photographs, black & white, gelatin silver print, anodised aluminium frame, variable dimensions (26,3 x 26,3 cm each); Black Disk, 2008, black & white, gelatin silver print, anodised aluminium frame, 12,3 x 17,3 cm. Edition 1/5 + 2AP. Previous pages: Black Disk, 2008, black & white, gelatin silver print, anodised aluminium frame, 12,3 x 17,3 cm. Edition 1/5 + 2AP.

“I move through production patterns, appearance and reception of images”. Through this statement Guillaume Leingre points out a new direction in the use of photographic material, blowing up the traditional surface of the images. Over the last years he has been tearing apart the photographer’s role and photography imagery through series like Portraitiste de France (20032007), actions, and writings. Guillaume Leingre has been breaking consciously and patiently all the rules, cutting loose from the photography family, showing off the naked roots of a grateful inheritance of the Dadaists, the Conceptualists, the Minimalists, the Situationists, the Oulipo, Fluxus... He seeks to create works using constrained conception and production techniques with a great knowledge of both historical and contemporary contexts.

reality where things repeat on a mathematical algorythm. That’s what lies beneath, in the obsolescence and captivating mystery of the QR Code (that can only be read by some japanese cellphones), a photograph like a mandala structure dedicated to the relentless beauty of an exponentially abstract world. Guillaume Leingre is right. It’s the only way to take a picture of it.

In 2005 and 2010, for the performance Bouge Pas, Meurs, Ressuscite, Guillaume Leingre and his friend and artist Pascal Lièvre are wearing suits and, by turns, they flogg a photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe (Selfportrait, 1978) to complete destruction. This playful tabula rasa action prompted up the start of the most radical direction in Leingre’s work. Radical referring both to an implied radical social stance, as well as a returning to the radical “root” of photography, assuming that this re-assertion of social relevance for abstraction, hadn’t been emphasized to such an extent since Malevitch’s and Rodchenko’s paintings. With 200 Circles, a series of photographs depicting the two hundred circles painted on white canvas by Olivier Mosset from 1964 to 1972, Guillaume Leingre reaches the very disturbing equilibrium of creating “silent photographs”. Photographs of virtual spaces and multiplicating cells. Primitive photographs. Primordial photographs. The Crossed Cross-word Puzzle series echoes the 200 Circles series. Same dimensions. Same level. Same releavance in the processing. Same cognitive state revealing the strength of what lies beneath the surface of the photograph. A looking glass to face a shameless

An exhibition of photographs is the first personal exhibition in Japan of Guillaume Leingre.

Then, Guillaume Leingre declares independance with a Black Disk that stands as a point final, altogether a spot on a small white rectangular surface, like a postcard, like a photograph of a possible flag, like a brand new flag for a brand new utopia, and like a black hole happy to swallow the world.

Born in 1971 (France), he lives and works in Paris (France). He was resident at the Villa Kujoyama (Kyoto) in 2008.

CIRCUMNAVIGATOR’S PARADOX MATHIEU MERCIER 08.05-10.11/08

Untitled, 2007, epoxy painted stainless tubes, plastic fixtures, wire, light bulb, variable dimensions. Multiple. Right page, top, exhibition view, from left to right: 100 cars on Karl Marx Allee, 20042007, color photograph, C-Print, 160 x 120 cm. Edition 1/3; Untitled, 2007, epoxy painted stainless tubes, plastic fixtures, wire, light bulb, variable dimensions. Multiple; Zapfino 53, 2008, acrylic, clock, variable dimensions. Unique. Right page, bottom, exhibition view, from left to right: 100 cars on Karl Marx Allee, 20042007, color photograph, C-Print, 160 x 120 cm. Edition 1/3; Untitled, 2007, epoxy painted stainless tubes, plastic fixtures, wire, light bulb, variable dimensions. Multiple; Zapfino 53, 2008, acrylic, clock, variable dimensions. Unique; Untitled, 2008, polystyrene, cotton, button, 31 x 26 x 27 cm. Unique. Previous pages: 100 cars on Karl Marx Allee, 2004-2007, color photograph, C-Print, 160 x 120 cm. Edition 1/3.

What appears to be the earliest reference to the circumnavigator’s paradox is found in the works of the Syrian prince and geographer-historian, Isma’il ibn ‘Ali ibn Mahmud ibn Muhammad ibn Taqi ad-Din ‘Umar ibn Shahanshah ibn Ayyub al Malik al Mu’ayyad ‘Imad ad-Din Abu ‘l-Fida (1273-1331). In his Taqwim al-buldan, Abu ’lFida described how a traveller, depending on which direction he is travelling in, would either lose or gain a day at the completion of his circumnavigation. French scholar Nicole Oresme (c. 1325-1382) repeated this argument in his Quaestiones supra speram, a series of clarifications of questions (based on the popular cosmographical treatise Tractatus de Sphaera by Johannes de Sacrobosco) in which he quoted his travellers Plato and Socrates and a “control man”, Petrus, and allowed both travellers the same pace of 14.4 degrees of longitude per 24-hour day. When the philosophers returned at their starting point, Plato (the westward traveller) had logged twenty-four days, Socrates (the eastward traveller) no less than twenty-six days, while Petrus saw the sun rise and set only twenty-five times. In order to resolve the circumnavigator’s paradox for future travellers, Oresme concluded his discussion of the imaginary journeys of Plato and Socrates with the observation: “From this it follows that if this [equatorial] zone were everywhere habitable, one ought to assign a definite place where a change of the name of the day would be made, for otherwise Socrates would have two names for the same day and Plato would have the same name for two days.” Mathieu Mercier untitles most of his artworks and exhibitions. Untitled as a title itself, but we wanted to offer Mathieu Mercier a title for his very first personal exhibition in Japan : Circumnavigator’s Paradox. He immediately adopted it, like a ready made. This exhibition title aims to embody an enigma as well as a key to understand the artist’s work that has often been described as elliptic, using objects and their combinations of historical, visual, social, poetical languages,

references and values, signs and cognitive mater in order to build perspectives, reflections, vergences, paraboles, metaphores, images, eclipses... Inflexions of contemporary mass production symbols and consumerist paranoia that established Mercier’s pieces in the field of higly desirable items. Desirable beyond any domestic celebration. Brand new objects of desire. Desire of possession, desire of power, desire of social status and also desire of knowledge, desire of comprehending and desire to transcend. Zigzagging across the waters of the Pacific Ocean near the 180º meridian, the International Date Line (IDL) is plotted on today’s charts and globes to indicate the boundary line between ‘today’ and ‘tomorrow’. Despite its name, however, the precise location of the International Date Line is not fixed by any international law, treaty or agreement. This is exactly where Mathieu Mercier stands. On this thin and imaginary line. Between the familiar artefacts and “nostalgia” of yesterday and the menacing figures of an uncertain tomorrow, where the art’s at.

Circumnavigator’s Paradox, is the first personal exhibition in Japan of Mathieu Mercier. Mathieu Mercier reiceved the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2003. He founded the Galerie de Multiples in Paris with Gilles Drouault. Mathieu Mercier is represented by Super Window Project and the following international galleries: Medhi Chouakri (Berlin), Jack Hanley (New York/San Francisco), Massimo Minini (Brescia), Lange & Pult (Neuchâtel/Zürich). He was resident at the Villa Kujoyama (Kyoto) in 2007. Born in 1970 (France), Mathieu Mercier lives and works in Paris.

EYE OF THE BEYONDER ITEM IDEM 12.25/08-02.28/09 “The Eye of the Beyonder was a legendary artifact. It was said that this relic would guide its owner to a map that led to a treasure located somewhere within the haunted Jandoon system. Tzizvvt claimed that he knew the location of this relic ; Solomahal then joined him in his quest to retrieve The Eye of the Beyonder and, more importantly, the treasure itself.”

Eye of the Beyonder, 2008, plexiglas, stainless steel, neon lights, Marvel’s Secret Wars confetti, silver paillettes, turntable, 100 x 90 cm. Unique ; Eye of the Beyonder II, 2008, neon light, plastic letters, 210 x 45 cm. Unique. Right page, top, exhibition view: Eye of the Beyonder, 2008, plexiglas, stainless steel, neon lights, Marvel’s Secret Wars confetti, silver paillettes, turntable, 100 x 90 cm. Unique. Previous pages: Eye of the Beyonder II, 2008, neon light, plastic letters, 210 x 45 cm. Unique.

Right after his Big Beacon lightened up Fredric Snitzer Gallery at Art Basel Miami Beach, Item Idem delivers a brand new christmas hit via a minimal and striking visual display: a sculpture, a neon light installation and special effects “to end 2008 in a dramatic attempt to represent the notion of evil itself”. Eye of the Beyonder blends cinematographic and pop(ular) visual codes, Walt Disney’s trademark fairytales, Marvel’s superhero and supervillain manichean imagery, Star Wars forgotten legends, 80’s horror movies and the hypnotic sequencing music videos. Following the Item Idem methodology of deconstruction/re-construction, Eye of the Beyonder is a complex and hybrid exhibition process, a mashup of intertwined references, crossbreeding experimentations, either unnatural or supernatural. The result is a perverse charade, a contemporary vanity all in black, white, pink and silver : dark, contrasted, sharp and dangerously shiny. A display of objects working as images, metaphors of themselves. Objects in a window, objects in a mirror and objects as mirrors themselves. Eye of the Beyonder is a looking glass. Popism and contemporary icons, brand logos, marketing and advertising strategies, fashion hits, product design, luxury cravings, self-celebration, mass consumption, tribal and magical rituals, are Item Idem’s prima materia to create hypnotizing, irritating and disarming visual systems: installations, sculptures, photographies, performances. A true quest for aura and a journey towards beauty like a re-enchanting therapy. “I am delighted to think about product value transmutation, and how to elevate materials conceptually to a point where art is really about the addition of ideas and shapes into something bigger, something that reaches splendour”, says Item Idem. With Eye of the Beyonder and Eye of the Beyonder II, direct references to Walt Disney and to Marvel superpowers of the entertainment in-

dustry, use of kid and teenage culture work like an electric shock. But Item Idem keeps adding layers of childish and magnetic fascination to fabricate a dreadful mind game that questions the definition and place of the artist, his work and artworks. The exhibition composed of two interactive installations is a closed system: a pink neon light shines on a snow globe in wich to admire the fallen confetti and sparkles of yesterday’s party, like a crystal ball in wich to catch reflections of tomorrow’s memories, a globe of eye to look at and that looks back at us. In the distance a voice says : “Hello Danny. Come and play with us. Come and play with us, Danny... for ever, and ever, and ever.”

Born in 1977 (France), Item Idem lives and works in New York (USA).

RED JACKET VS WHITE JACKET PIERRE LA POLICE 04.25-06.06/09

Go, Went, Gone, 2009, video, 10’ (loop). Right page, top, exhibition view, from left to right: Sans titre (Doudoune Blanche contre Doudoune Rouge), 2008, 20 unique paintings, gouache on printed canvas, 14,5 x 21 cm; Go, Went, Gone, 2009, video, 10’ (loop). Right page, bottom, exhibition view: Sans titre (Doudoune Blanche contre Doudoune Rouge), 2008, 20 unique paintings, gouache on printed canvas, 14,5 x 21 cm. Previous pages: Sans titre (Doudoune Blanche contre Doudoune Rouge), 2008, gouache on printed canvas, 14,5 x 21 cm. Unique.

Red Jackect Vs White Jacket, and Super Jacket Sentai at the Kyoto International Manga Museum, are two exhibitions conceived as sequels to the exhibition Doudoune Blanche contre Doudoune Rouge (Galerie Kamel Mennour, 2008, Paris).This set of exhibitions are Pierre La Police very own tribute to the japanese culture of tokusatsu, one of the most popular forms of Japanese entertainment. The exhibition itself is a return to the origins of the entire series of drawings that Pierre La Police started to produce during his residency at the Villa Kujoyama in 2006. The purpose is to deliberately confront the image, its inception, production, perception and projection in both social and cultural spaces, and through different contextualization processes, to question the media themselves: drawings (gouache on paper), paintings (gouache on printed canvas), videos (gouache and animation on video). To create the pieces of the exhibitions, Pierre La Police uses the material of thousands of photograms extracted from 60’s and 70’s Japanese movies and television series. To develop his own scenario, he creates a perfect black box, in which to freely play with visual and pictorial elements and their cinematic references. Introduced by a series of fourteen black and white drawings in a fanfolded booklet edition, the exhibition aims to present a dramatically minimal, distant and yet vivid vision of a spectacular momentum towards an irreversible destruction of our humanity : grotesquely cubist superheros (or supervillains) fighting each other and/or evanescent, filiform and menacing bipods that seem to meticulously proceed to a silent invasion. Resistance is pointless, and no one seems to care. More than ever, the work of avant-garde French cartoonist Pierre La Police, marked by provocatively bizarre draftsmanship and absurdist humor, defies classification. It has become a cult classic. Pierre La Police’s acuteness relies on a treatment of stereotypes and truisms as his deconstruction of language and use of ironic visual signifiers stretch the limits of the comics

medium through a variety of reflexive devices. Pierre La Police’s art reflects on the tautological underpinnings of mass culture, therefore La Police appears to be a true iconoclast, in both meanings of the term : an original artist who ironically challenges the predictability of mass culture, but also a “breaker of images”, who has taken pictorial representation to a new level of self-awareness.

Pierre La Police was resident at the Villa Kujoyama in 2006. He is represented by Super Window Project and Galerie Kamel Mennour (Paris). He lives and work in Paris (France).

REPETITION AURELIE PETREL 06.20-08.16/09 Since Garden Party, 2007, (Saint Joseph & Saint Luc hospital, Lyon, France), and Nocturne/Le Temps du loup, 2008 (Void has no exit, 2008, Hiroshima, Japan, curators Pascal Beausse & Yukiko Ito) through specific photographic techniques, Pétrel creates conceptual tricks, and displacements of reality, in-between spaces. Pétrel develops structures and layers within the image by using the advertising techniques of photographs printed on sheets of adhesive film and applied on windows. The architecture of the image is combined to the architecture of the space where the photographs originate and are displayed to create a totally new and original experience of the image. An image that is a piece of

architecture and architecture that is a visual, mental, sociological, metaphorical and metaphysical structure of projection. The projection of an immobile, silent, distant, and yet possible but absent reality. Pétrel’s photographic installations materially translate this absence of reality. Thus, Pétrel transforms the very notion of technique and technique becomes an opportunity for double play : it amplifies the concept of illusion and visual forms. Complicity between the artwork and the world is established. The power of objects and of “objective” techniques converge. The photographic act consists in entering this space of intimate complicity, not to master it, but to play along with it and to demonstrate that nothing has

been decided yet. “What cannot be said must be kept silent.” But what cannot be said can also be kept silent through a display of images. The idea is to resist noise, speech, rumours by mobilizing photography’s silence ; to resist movement, flow, and speed by using its immobility ; to resist the explosion of communication and information by brandishing its secrecy ; and to resist the moral imperative of meaning by deploying its absence of meaning. Suburbia, people queueing in airports, landscapes, construction sites... Most images speak, tell stories. Their noise cannot be turned down. They obliterate the silent signification of their objects but Pétrel’s

images achieve to get rid of everything that interferes with and cover up the manifestation of silent evidence. They filter the impact of the subject and facilitate the deployment of the objects’s own magic. The object is never anything more than an imaginary line. The world is an object that is both imminent and ungraspable. How far is the world ? How does one obtain a clearer focus point ? Is photography a mirror which briefly captures this imaginary line of the world ? Or is it man who, blinded by the enlarged reflection of his own consciousness, falsifies visual perspectives and blurs the accuracy of the world ? Is it like the rearview mirrors of American cars which distort visual perspectives but give you a nice warning “objects in this mirror may be closer than they appear” ? But, in fact, aren’t these objects farther than they appear ? Does the photographic image bring us closer to a so-called “real world” which is in fact infinitely distant ? Or does this image keep the world at a distance by creating an artificial depth perception which protects us from the imminent presence of the objects and from their virtual danger ? With this double exhibition, Répétition, Pétrel explores furthermore the miracle of photography, of its so-called objective image, that reveals a radically non-objective world. Pétrel’s photographs through the play of visual techniques, the slicing of reality, immobility, silence, and the phenomenological reduction of movements, assert the most artificial and the purest exposition of the image. She has added to her vocabulary a new comprehending context and a contemplative dimension that takes us beyond the replica, into the field of the trompe l’oeil. She has subtly introduced into the specific body of work, presented at Super Window Project, a com-

ment about the Japanese concept of shakkei (借景), or borrowed scenery* with nearby Enstu-ji, (one of the first and best examples of shakkei gardens in Japan) as a direct reference and inspiration. But here, in the intimacy of a home, with large windows overlooking a small private garden, both sides of the image are visible. Look outside, look inside, the image is captured in the middle, frozen, materially suspended, offering the furtive density of superimposed images to the light and hours of the day. A full immersion in a state of grace in which to draw intimate geographies. In the meantime, Pétrel shuttered the white cube of Muzz Program Space with another series of photographs entirely covering the ten-meter long glass façade, and transforming the building itself into a lifesize light box from the outside. Pétrel literally offers through this photographic installation the opportunity to confront the (meta)physical emptiness of the white cube, and to question the reality and its double from the inside. What is at stake is the place of reality, the question of its degree. Photography questions “pure reality”, but still does not expect an answer.

Répétion is the first personal exhibition in Japan of Aurélie Pétrel. Born in 1980 (France), Aurélie Pétrel lives and works in Lyon.

*principle of “incorporating background landscape into the composition of a garden” found in traditional East Asian garden design.

This page, top: exhibition view from inside (Super Window Project): Shakkei 1 (Falaise), 2009, PVC transparent adhesive film, 160 x 200 cm. Unique. Left page, top, exhibition view from inside (Super Window Project): Rappel, 2009, color photograph, C-print and diasec, 100 x 140 cm. Edition 1/5 +2 AP; Montperrin, 2009, color photograph, C-print and diasec, 100 x 66 cm. Edition 1/5 +2 AP; Miroir, 2009, color photograph, C-print and diasec, 50 x 66 cm. Edition 1/5 +2 AP. Left page, bottom, exhibition view (Super Window Project), from left to right): Rappel, 2009, color photograph, C-print and diasec, 100 x 140 cm. Edition 1/5 +2 AP; Montperrin, 2009, color photograph, C-print and diasec, 100 x 66 cm. Edition 1/5 +2 AP. First pages: To Build a Fire, 2009, color photograph, C-print and diasec, 50 x 66 cm. Edition 1/5 +2 AP. Next pages: exhibition views from inside and outside (Muzz Program Space, Kyoto): Shakkei 2, 2009, PVC transparent adhesive film, variable dimensions. Unique. Exhibition views from inside and outside (Super Window Project, garden): Shakkei 1, 2009, PVC transparent adhesive film, variable dimensions. Unique.

ITEM IDEM BERNARD JOISTEN PERRINE LIEVENS GUILLAUME LEINGRE MATHIEU MERCIER AURELIE PETREL SANDRINE PELLETIER ART OSAKA ROOM 917 08.21-23/09 Right page: Aurélie Pétrel, Vitrine, 2009, C-print and diasec, 50 x 76 cm (1/5 + 2AP); Miroir, 2009, C-print and diasec, 50 x 76 cm (1/5 + 2AP). Previous pages: UFO Attack 1, UFO Attack 2, 2008, found objects, watercolor, threads and Swarovski crystals on canvas, 13,5 x 9 x 10,7 cm. Unique.

Art Osaka offered Super Window Project its very first opportunity to build a group exhibition within the context of an art fair. Art Osaka is a local event which developed the peculiar idea to organize an art fair in a design hotel, each gallery having full liberty to display artworks in its own dedicated room. It was decided to create an atmospheric project in room 917 with a selection of pieces from the artists of the gallery, all together welcoming, intimate and odd, because a hotel room provides the perfect set to experience the uncanny, something familiar, yet foreign at the same time,

resulting in a(n) (un)comfortably strange feeling. Embroideries of Sandrine Pelletier, photographs of Aurélie Pétrel, drawings of Perrine Lievens, lamps of Mathieu Mercier, masks of Bernard Joisten, Louis Vuitton kimonos custom-trashed by Item Idem, video/performance of Guillaume Leingre on TV, create an ensemble of decorative comments that peacefully disturb the standard arrangement of the room, that makes it look inhabited, intense and lively with also so many art magazines and publications, flyers, books and catalogues of the artists, all around. Though, it is very much like snooping in secret the room of an invisible collector.

MORE & FOREVER MORE BERNARD JOISTEN 09.25-11.22/09

This page, top: Mask 001, 2009, fiberglass, synthetic resin enamel paint, 45 x 60 x 20 cm. Unique. Previous pages: Forever More, 2010, duratrans, digital print, 118,4 x 179,5 cm. Multiple. Right page: Armory (variable dimensions). All artworks : 2009, fiberglass, synthetic resin enamel paint. Unique. Central pages: Forever More, 2010, duratrans, digital print, 118,4 x 179,5 cm. Multiple. Installation view at Shijo station, Karasuma subway line, Kyoto, Japan. Last pages, left page: left to right, Mask 2.006 (45 x 65 x 20 cm), Mask 2.003 (60 x 65 x 20 cm), Mask 2.005 (60 x 60 x 20 cm), Mask 2.007 (50 x 60 x 20 cm), Armory (variable dimensions). All artworks : 2009, fiberglass, synthetic resin enamel paint. Unique. Last pages, right page, top: Red castle, 2009, wallpainting, variable dimensions. Unique. Last pages, right page, bottom: left to right, Armory (variable dimensions), Mask 2.004 (60 x 65 x 20 cm), Mask 2.002 (60 x 65 x 20 cm), Mask 2.001 (45 x 60 x 20 cm). All artworks : 2009, fiberglass, synthetic resin enamel paint. Unique.

Somewhere between minimal art, advertising technics, Tron series, medieval and chivalric iconography, and mecha fantasy, the exhibition More and its sequel Forever More are two projects that demonstrate Bernard Joisten’s ability at using the exhibition space and time as a conceptual variable where he can experiment with infinite components and bend inherent constraints. Digitalism, video game graphic patterns and pathologies extensively explored and analysed in Joisten’s latest works as well as the use of hyperbolic titles (Illimité, 2009, More and Forever More, 2010) echo the exhibition’s quest to reach new visual heights and answer contemporary society’s aims to break records, boundaries, limits and rules.

eos always instil an irritating feeling. Everything is staged and therefore set to deceive. There is nothing more to be seen but the stage and the set itself, though cinematic effects and dramatization play the biggest part in Joisten’s deceptive structures. To play, to act, to mask. Joisten develops, through visual schemes, an iconoclastic, ambiguous yet sharp body of works in which the pieces, only produced for the show, aim to perform. Exhibition is a performance and builds a unique occasion for Joisten to write scenarii, to create the lines of a dialogue between the pieces, and implement diverses practices such as painting, sculpture, installation, video, to provoke a dissolution of all the elements called upon.

More and Forever More exhibitions both include the Masks series that Joisten initiated in Japan in 2006. Japanese companies such as Comestock and Whitehouse were approached to deliver perfectly manufactured and tuned pieces. The materials involved in the production process are serial fiberglass parts for motorbikes (readymades selected from online catalogues) Illustrator graphic paintings and Pantone references. Joisten, thus never saw the pieces prior to their being displayed on the gallery walls as trophies, hybrid objects with direct references to science fiction blockbusters, japanimation and sentai series -Japanese superflat pop culture always played a leading part in Joisten productions since his first travel in 1996- because of their anthropomorphic or, more accurately, humanoid lines and features. Both facade and gallery wallpaintings were digitally rendered and executed by assistants according to the artist’s vectorial drawings: a castle, a tori, a horizon line, like visual structures borrowed straight from video games. Something involving projectual strategies and qualities. Somehow, More as an exhibition does not really exist, but dramatically stands as a digital and mental projection that indulges in a disturbing effect of derealization.

The exhibitions More and Forever More are solid examples of this fabrication in which Joisten looks forward to stretching formally and conceptually the surface of the objects to their limits. Therefore, Joisten may be often mistaken for a sculptor or an installation artist, but painting is most certainly his one and only concern. Painting as a visual storytelling process and the use of tricks. Joisten’s installations penetrate painting in an bid to represent reality and perception through citations of academic means and an abundance of iconographic imagery as well as symbolic and historical layers. Multiplying perspectives, construction lines, patterns, colors and vibrations, surfaces, textures, volumes. Here lies the tension between Joisten’s fabrications and fantasies, when the exhibition becomes the event in which the pieces exert strong forces on each other. Survival and archaism within hypermodernism. Contemporaneity as an archeology of the future. Joisten simultaneously disrupts and activates historical references while his computers keep generating structures yet to be painted.

Joisten’s installations, sculptures, paintings, vid-

Friction is the force resisting the relative lateral (tangential) motion of solid surfaces, fluid layers, or material elements in contact. Joisten’s pieces and exhibitions create frictions, are fric-

tions themselves. Painting vs textures, textures vs perspectives, perspectives vs objects, objects vs painting. In Joisten’s productions, technology affects, inclines, expands and emphasizes representation and aesthetics geology, pictorial geography and conceptual tectonic shifting models. Joisten uses the exhibition as an intentional space, and a fictional space, a scheme for artworks to corroborate its visual purpose, a space where to multiply minimalist stigmatas and archetypes, adding pure graphic effects in the most baroque celebration of superimposition. Also, contextual signs and hypermodern symbolism are very present in each and every Joisten’s productions: deadly machines and weapons, spacecrafts, war drones, party girls, cracks, holes, digital patterns, grids and architectonic structures, castles, fashion accessories, computer graphics and endless roads. A whole world of virtual smoothness, and sharp perfection. Thus Joisten pieces and exhibitions may have often been described as irritatingly seductive. Almost too much so, excessively so, but not that much either yet. A means to distort representation, a way to create dissonances, a space in between decorum and decoration, an inter-zone for the artist in which to play with the values of graphism and painting, sculpture and display, screenplay and history of art. A possible place for nostalgia for the future. Structurally, the exhibition More is set as a showroom, a recreational structure, a visual and sculptural installation of intricated references but deceptive shapes. Nothing more and nothing less than a mix

and (mis)match of colors and materials, textures, surfaces, in a playful, mental and visual game. Its sequel Forever More is much more of a materialistic machinery: the very same sculptures featured in More were then shot to become the protagonists of an advertising campaign in the light boxes of the subway of Kyoto. A sequence of six panels create a progressive graphic, vivid and colorful ensemble, a visual and shocking vibration in such a beige environment. The artwork is advertised with no explanation. An object, a classic packshot, a baseline, Forever More, the logo of the brand (of the artist), the logos of the manufacturers, of the gallery, the website... everything is set, all the codes should be readable, clear, but remain silent and opaque. It is formally impossible to understand the message, the object and/or the subject. Only the pleasure of a visual and conceptual charade. The installation itself overrules the City of Kyoto basic regulations and may stay in place forever more. Through this final act, Joisten creates a conceptual chain of reactions starting from the very exhibition inception: serial items recycled into artworks. Artworks recycled into luxury goods. Luxury goods recycled into images. Images recycled into advertising campaign. Advertising campaign recycled back into art. There is no other point in the process but to point out the process itself, to challenge yet again and again the conditions, the status and the necessities of the exhibition structure. For Joisten making art is an excuse to create a context in which the artwork itself is the means and the subject of evidenciation. Its purpose is then to blur the focus point, and to make it disappear, in order to give the audience the pos-

sibility to experience the structure of the artwork and the very essence of the artistic process. A simple way to define art. Art as a mental thing.

More, and Forever More are the first personal exhibitions in Japan of Bernard Joisten. Bernard Joisten was resident at the Villa Kujoyama (Kyoto) in 2000 and at the Arcus Program (Ibaraki) in 1996. Born in 1962 (France), he lives and works in Paris (France).

NO MAN’S LAND BERNARD JOISTEN FEAT. SHINICHIRO ARAKAWA GUILLAUME LEINGRE MATHIEU MERCIER AURELIE PETREL TAKASHI SUZUKI 11.22/09-02.18/10 Four rooms in the context of an abandonned modernist building, the former Embassy of France in Tokyo (1950, architects: Desmarets & Belmont), about to be destroy for real estate reasons. A place where to build a dialogue between pieces and artists from the gallery, Bernard Joisten (FR), Guillaume Leingre (FR), Mathieu Mercier (FR), Aurélie Pétrel (FR), alongside invited artists, stylist Shinichiro Arakawa (JP) and photographer Takashi Suzuki (JP). An opportunity for the gallery program to write a new chapter and imagine, off-site, an alternative aesthetic project in which to come and play with objects, context, purpose, apparition, disappearance, presence, architecture, construction, perspective, space, human activity, social identification,

modernism, postmodernism and hypermodernism theories, historical and visual references, disambiguation process, structuralism, minimalism, conceptual inheritance, (visual and national) identity, human consciousness, metaphysical activation... no man’s land as blank page, an empty space, an unoccupied area between two opposing positions. A possible place where to start again.

Office #109, Bernard Joisten feat. Shinichiro Arakawa, Mathieu Mercier, Aurélie Pétrel: Inside out, architecture, building, windows, cinemascope landscapes, lonesome cowboy, easy rider, spatial concept, wall installation, constellation, travelling without moving, folding space, visible, invisible... Exhibition view from outside: Aurélie Pétrel, ... que nuage..., 2009, PVC adhesive film, variable dimensions. Unique. Previous pages: Guillaume Leingre, Wkids, 2009, video (still frame), performance (after William Klein, New York 1954-55, Éditions Marval, Paris, 1995), with Lionel Monier, color, 3’. Edition 5/10.

Exhibition views: Aurélie Pétrel, ... que nuage..., 2009, PVC adhesive film, variable dimensions; Bernard Joisten feat. Shinichiro Arakawa, Carrousel (merry-go-round), 2009, custom painted Honda Cafe 750, 215 x 77 x 119 cm; custom painted leather jacket, custom painted leather pants, custom painted helmet by Shinichiro Arakawa. Unique. Mathieu Mercier, Mur de chevilles, 1994-1997, patern, plastic wall plugs (pink, red, blue, green, black), variable dimensions. Collection FRAC Pays de la Loire, France.

Office #003, Guillaume Leingre, Aurélie Pétrel: Video, performance, misery, children, guns, shooting, desperation, Far West, reflections, screens, mirors, black room, darkroom, window, wildlife…

This double page, exhibition views: Guillaume Leingre, Wkids, 2009, video (still frame), performance (after William Klein, New York 1954-55, Éditions Marval, Paris, 1995), with Lionel Monier, color, 3’. Edition 5/10; Aurélie Pétrel, Shakkei 1, 2009, PVC adhesive film, variable dimensions. Unique; Miroir, 2009, C-print and diasec, 50 x 76 cm (1/5 + 2AP).

Next double page, exhibition views: Takashi Suzuki, Bau 0861, 2009, C-print, 8.5 x 11cm, 3 + 2AP ; Mathieu Mercier, PiĂ¨ce lumineuse, 2007, stainless tubes, epoxy paint, plastic fixtures, wires, bulbs, variable dimensions. Collection Villa Kujoyama, Kyoto.

Office #001, Takashi Suzuki, Mathieu Mercier: Focus, atmosphere, loneliness, solitude, raw materials, bare walls, a picture, an architecture, a narrow window, an utopian ideal, a lamp, a structure, a vectorial space, a tree...

Office #009, Mathieu Mercier: Statement, architecture, utopia, modernist slavery, fragile, immaculate, white collar, salary man, money, dishumanisation of reality, to forget, forgotten, abandoned ship, abandoned world, lost, lonely, broke and broken...

Exhibition view: Mathieu Mercier, Untitled, 2008, polystyrene, cotton, button, 31 x 26 x 27 cm. Unique. Mur de chevilles, 1994-1997, patern, plastic wall plugs (pink, red, blue, green, black), variable dimensions. Collection FRAC Pays de la Loire, France.

PAYS EXTERIEURS SANDRINE PELLETIER 12.25/09-02.28/10 The exhibition Pays Extérieurs is a geographic, physical and conceptual experience revolving around the idea of journeys. A journey of the meaning, of its impact, as a constitutive element of the production of principles and structures of a work in which the introduction of the notion of improvisation would induce an emergency and an acceleration of its very principles. A hastening.

From left to right: Vertebrae, 2008, lace and latex, 240 x 40 cm. Unique; Paysage, 2009, objects, artist’s lock of hair, threads, variable dimensions. Unique. Right page: Paysage (detail), 2009, objects, artist’s lock of hair, threads, variable dimensions. Unique. Previous pages: Embrasse, 2009, electric wires, 100 x 100 x 100 cm. Unique. Central pages: Vernaculaire, 2009, Japanese oak, watercolors, metalic wires, nail varnish, 300 x 210 cm x variable height. Unique. Last pages: Parade, 2009, nylon fabric, gravels, ø 250 cm. Unique.

Born in 1976 (Switzerland), Sandrine Pelletier lives and works in Geneva (Switzerland). Pays Extérieurs is the first personal exhibition in Japan of Sandrine Pelletier.

Sandrine Pelletier’s work was originally borne through the production of objects rehashing elaboration methods borrowed from folk art and Arts & Crafts from their most noble to their most trivial accepted meaning, to erect a body of autonomous pieces, related to the idea of a misappropriation and to an experimentation of the limits of materials, from the initial embroideries (Wild Boys, 2002-2004, Mysanthropy, 2005) to the monumental thread-based installations (GoodBye Horses, 2009), including the urban interventions (Plastic Palliness, 2009). This first solo show by Sandrine Pelletier in Japan borrows its title from the geopolitical notions at work in the Jean-Luc Godard film, Alphaville (1965). The two opening lines of the film: “Il arrive que la réalité soit trop complexe pour la transmission orale. La légende la recrée sous une forme qui lui permet de courir le monde“ determine the improvisation process later developed by the artist. The quotation is nothing more than a quotation. The point is to begin, to say once upon a time.., to supply a pre-text and a key to the interpretation of the very context of appearance of the works and the proceedings of the exhibition. Through Pays Extérieurs, Pelletier conceives the conditions of the implementation of a detachment process that enables her to directly restore the conceptual and formal processes of the elaboration of her own work, to create an endless mirror effect. Four pieces make up the show: Vernaculaire, Embrasse, Parade, Paysages. Vernaculaire is an installation in the original sense, a possible arrangement of branches and logs among whose tips only one will have been painstakingly covered in nail polish in a suggestive trompe-l’oeil of matter in a dialogue with its “organicity”. The result imposes itself like an architecture made of iron threads and natural “beams” floating in the volume of the gallery,

half-foliage and half-root. Lyrical, in a symbolic and ironic balance between the living and the “pre-fabricated”. Embrasse, borrows its aesthetic vocabulary from the overbearing presence of cables and electric wires in the Japanese landscape. It proclaims a formal belonging to post-Duchamp sculpture yet frees itself of it tautologically by its simultaneous rejection of all function and of all decorative character. A piece whose meaning escapes all systematic interpretation like Parade, which is related to a land-art piece as well as to the remains of a sacrificial pyre. The fabric of the piece will thus suggest the possibility of a lure and the manner in which to elude it, without truly succeeding, without managing to grasp either its meaning or its function. Paysages shall provide no answers. This work unfolds over a piece of wooden furniture in the most blatant modernist tradition. A confined hall, the entrance to a villa, whose tapestry is embroidered in hair-length threads in graded tones. Three porcelain eggs and the bust of a young girl, plastic embroidery, a crystal ashtray, an unmounted framework with a lock of golden hair, a small black faience vase and a bunch of dried plants together constitute this landscape: an ensemble of objects (probably) personal, an intimate ready-made, a display whose deciphering becomes obscene as it in vain compels appropriation. Thus, Pelletier manages with each of these pieces to deconstruct, one by one, through a conscious and skillful use of the context, the elements which constitute her own work and to expose by contamination the semantic contents of the works on display. She delivers, with the freedom bestowed by improvisation, an exhibition designed like an autonomous object, partaking in the elaboration of a fine arts and aesthetical theory: a reflection on matter, whether the matter of the exhibition or the matter constitutive of her works, their place as objects, and the symbolic relations they entertain with their own origins. This formal evolution in the work of Pelletier places her straightaway in the field of conceptual art. It endows her with the means to redefine her own work and to answer the question of the function of art through logical means as well as via the implementation of an intuitive and automatic writing, in an attempt to capsulate her relation to the world, to memory, to emotion, to identity, to the invisible.

FOLDING SPACE MORGANE TSCHIEMBER 03.26-05.23/10 “The disconcerting, disquieting, dumbfounding or even “de-realising” qualities displayed - sometimes simultaneously and sometimes successively - by the work of Morgane Tschiember, are due quite simply to the fact that art always differs from the conjectures that arise from any definition of its essence, whether the form taken by this temptation to define be it materialist, rethorical or artistic. Whatever the case, the artist systematically sets out to foil attempts at reifying both art in general and her contemporary offerings in particular. Indeed, like art itself, her body of work is at once polymorphous and protean and, as such, in perpetual expansion, as endlessly attested by the multiple techniques and protocols enrolled by Tschiember

to conduct her visual experiment and/ or to make her works.” Curator and art critic Jean-Charles Agboton-Jumeau perfectly captured Tschiember’s esthetical essence. Here, it’s all about steel, pink glossy paint, welding burns, mirrors, solid geometry. The powerful tension between architecture and object, object and subject, physics and physicality, reveals something dangerously at stake in Tschiember’s work. Something about physical attraction, something magnetic, sensual and sexual, suavity and raw seduction, instincts and pulsions. Tschiember’s pieces may appear as formalist post-pop comments, but in fact their shiny surfaces reflect images which the artist manipulate, break, disrupt, destroy and reset to

All pictures: Folded Space, 2010, steel, enamel paint, 310 x 260 x 220 cm; mirrors, 280 x 310 cm. Unique.

play alongside deceptive schemes and structures, with something metaphysical indeed. Morgane Tschiember reiceved the Paul Ricard Prize (Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard) in 2002. She is represented by Super Window Project and the following international galleries: Loevenbruck (Paris), Sollertis (Toulouse), Zoo (Nantes), Lange & Pult (Neuchâtel/Zürich), Audio Visual Arts (New York). She was resident at ISCP, New York in 2009 (CulturesFrance grant). Born in 1976 (France), Morgane Tschiember lives and works in Paris (France). Folding Space is the first personal exhibition in Japan of Morgane Tschiember.

SOLID GEOMETRY MORGANE TSCHIEMBER ART FAIR TOKYO 04.01-04/10

This page: Solid Geometry, 2010, aluminium cans, enamel paint, variable dimensions. Unique. Previous pages: Art Fair Tokyo 2010, exhibition view. From left to right: Display, 2009, aluminium, enamel paint, variable dimensions, Unique. Deadline (grey), 2010, wallpainting, acrylic paint, variable dimensions (300 x 270 cm). Unique. Folded Space, 2010, steel, enamel paint, 60 x 60 x 40 cm. Unique.

BOUKE DE VRIES ITE BERNARD JOISTEN MO ULTRA KYOTO 05.14-16/10

This page: Morgane Tschiember, Display #1 & Display #2, 2009, aluminium, enamel paint, variable dimensions, Unique. Bernard Joisten, Mask 2.003 (60 x 65 x 20 cm), Mask 2.007 (50 x 60 x 20 cm), Mask 2.004 (60 x 65 x 20 cm), 2009, fiberglass, synthetic resin enamel paint. Unique. Previous pages: Item Idem, Untitled (Silver), Untitled (Gold), 2009, handbags, survival blanket foil, plastic, tar, stainless steel, 140 x 150 x 7 cm (each). Unique. Bouke de Vries, Etruscan football, 2010, etruscan earthenware foot and mixed media, 36 x 25 x 34 cm. Unique.

EM IDEM ORGANE TSCHIEMBER

DIRECTION OF MATERIALS SOSHI MATSUNOBE 06.11-08.08/10

This page, above: Direction of Materials (exhibition view), 2010, paper, inkjet print, veneer structure, variable dimensions. Each element is unique. Right page: Direction of Materials (exhibition view), 2010, paper, inkjet print, veneer structure, variable dimensions. Each element is unique. Previous pages: Direction of Materials (exhibition view, detail), 2010, paper, inkjet print, veneer structure, variable dimensions. Each element is unique. Nextl pages: Direction of Materials (detail), 2010, paper, inkjet print, variable dimensions. Each element is unique. Last page: Direction of Materials (detail), 2010, paper, inkjet print, veneer structure, variable dimensions. Each element is unique.

Radical, dramatically minimalist, yet disarming and poetic, the conceptual and visual vocabulary of Soshi Matsunobe links (or blurs definitions) of sculpture, drawing, installation in a single artistic, philosophical and metaphysical experience. His very first project within the 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 aesthetic 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 up as a deceptive structure, as there is nothing really to be exhibited, nothing but a production process, a work in progress, or better yet a work to be processed : a library/ storage structure, and materials. The ensemble aesthetically proceeds from the office, or the workshop/shop 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 above all connects to a zen experience. This is where Matsunobe masters

to exemplify reductivist ideas. The printed lines obviously and purposely recalll the fibers, the veins of (construction) wood, or even by extension, the parallel lines of gravels of the japanese dry garden traditional designs, but Matsunobe’s cultural inheritance lies far more in the assertion of the invisible rules of the asceticism of shapes, of forms, of the economy of the production means, of the balance and enhancement 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 bee removed from the final installation. The material just stands and waits. For Matsunobe, this act of deception, denies 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 and activate philosophical considerations of art functions and purposes. Art as a mental thing. The very opportunity for Matsunobe to look simultaneously back and beyond the platonic definition of 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 towards another parallel direction, in which representational structures must be somewhat intelligible, yet must still aim to capture the object’s form. Matsunobe focuses on how the creation of art communicates the idea behind 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). Direction of Materials is the artist’s first solo show at the gallery.

BAU TAKASHI SUZUKI 06.25-07.25/10 Takashi Suzuki (1971) uses photography as a central element of his visual and conceptual strategies. Photography is his tool to extensively explore the surface and the structure of the image, the image intended as an object, and photography as a sculptural process. Bau is the first project of the artist with Super Window Project. Bau is an off-site collaboration with REP (Radlab Exhibition Project), Kyoto.

All pictures: Bau (exhibition view), 2010, C-print on wood, 8,5 x 11 cm (each photograph). Edition 1/3 + 2 AP.

Bau consists of a series of hundreds photographs initiated in 2009. The ensemble is clearly conceived as a work in progress and an exercise revolving around the idea of architecture, architecture in its most radical definition, structure, construction, and of the central figure of the building. The title, borrowed from German, bau, clearly refers to the idea of building something, formally, and mentally. The series stands as a comment on the Bauhaus historically conceptual, creative and political attempt, on the modernist utopian subsidiaries and on the post-modernist statement, as a playful reenactment. Suzuki extensively manipulates, experiments with soft, cheap, materials such as sponges, construction and isolating materials, rubbers, plastics chosen by the artist for their specific surface, color, shape... attributes ; he then photographs these thousands of small archi-sculptures on a black background. The use of this black background sometimes enhances the architectural characteristics, sometimes the materials qualities and colors and also isolate the shape from all context. The object/subject of the picture stands alone. The black background frames the photographed object and then the photographs themselves stand as lonely objects on the walls, therefore providing infinite variations of display grids, combinations, sequences, classification. Bau series truly and simply reaches the limits of composition, association, and challenges the idea of series itself as well as the concepts of multiple, unicity, ensemble(s) and unity. Multiple interpretation, reading, perception are though offered to the viewer, depending on historical, formal, conceptual associations of point of views about perspective, photographic archetypes, architectural representation, spatial representation, concrete representation, mental representation, solid geometry, abstraction. Each object becoming an image, each image becoming a mental object.

Born in 1971 (Japan), Takashi Suzuki lives and works in Kyoto (Japan). Bau is the artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s first project with the gallery. Bau is an off-site collaboration with RAD (Research for Architectural Development), Kyoto.

STORAGE #1: PASCAL 07.30-08.29/10 OKU TEA HOUSE, KYOT

MATHIEU MERCIER 100 CARS ON KARL MA 2004-2007 C-PRINT 160 x 120 CM EDITION 1/3

BEAUSSE, CURATOR

TO, JAPAN

ARX ALLEE

NISSED SOSHI MATSUNOBE ART OSAKA 07.09-11/10

This page: Nissed, 2010, series of objects, tape, varnish, and site specific installation (Art Osaka, installation in Hotel Dojima), tape on ceramic tiles, variable dimensions. Unique. Previous pages: Nissed, 2010, tape, varnish, water, site specific installation (Art Osaka, installation in Hotel Dojima), variable dimensions. Unique.

Left page, right page, clockwise: Nissed (shirt & hanger), Nissed (tweezers), Nissed (ashtray), Nissed (toe separators), Nissed (notebook & pen), Nissed (contacts), 2010, series of objects, tape, varnish, site specific installation (Art Osaka, installation in Hotel Dojima), variable dimensions. Unique.

This double page, from left to right: Nissed (plate, fork, spoon), Nissed (bowls), Nissed (pistachios), Nissed (paper cup), 2010, series of objects, tape, varnish, site specific installation (Art Osaka, installation in Hotel Dojima), variable dimensions. Unique.

PIECES BOUKE DE VRIES 09.11-11.28/10 Bouke de Vries has since 2008 been elaborating sophisticated sculptures. As he developed over the past twenty years the highest skills, working as a ceramics restorer, he also collected sculptures, fragments and often broken and discarded pieces. De Vries bases his reflexion on the value of objects, as a comment on the relevance of market rules and of contemporary common disrespect for what is broken, imperfect, or flawed. From the craftsman workshop to the artist studio, de Vries certainly shows the highest interest and passion for those pieces that once were appreciated, loved, valued and collected.

exhibition to the next, from one place to the following one, in a heartbeat. Always the same, different, and unique, as they can be rebuilt, remade, re-activated. A perpetual sculpture and a work in progress, like history repeating itself again and again, a contemporary echo to the Myth of Sisyphus. De Vries became with Pieces fully aware of the central idea at the core of his work, what he calls the Beauty of Destruction. Pieces may appear formally different, radically minimalist, and conceptual, not as baroque as de Vries’s previous works, but it is actually the very same concept that runs through Pieces, simplified, magnified, and amplified.

De Vries built through his practice a certain penchant for the romanticism of stories and History, with a baroque sense of humour and flamboyant culture as he developed a work on (and of) memory and transmission, by reinterpreting, reactivating, the ceramics fragments. A fragile balance between permanence and impermanence (無常, mujo), an attempt to anchor moments and actions in time and space.

Pieces is also the occasion for de Vries to confront a more architectural scale. The site-specific display blurs the perception of the columns as twin towers and plays with the volume of the gallery space. Once again the historical references are present but not bluntly obvious, which would have been cynically redundant with the fact that the exhibition opened on September 11.

Pieces is the first solo show of the artist in Japan and this opportunity is the occasion for de Vries to work on a different scale. He fully embraced the idea of a site-specific ensemble to enhance his visual and conceptual vocabulary. The exhibition is the result of a long curatorial process, and cultivated exchanges between the artist and the gallery, where de Vries specifically explored one material: industrial glass. De Vries has been using glass since the beginning, collecting antique globes or building himself the glass boxes as elements of his compositions. He kept storing the broken glass pieces, conscientiously and meticulously, as he himself never really discards anything, Thus, de Vries’s exhibition project is built on the idea of two vertical glass boxes, or columns, or “twin towers”, filled to the brim with broken glass in the most precarious arrangement. Nothing is glued or definitive. Bits and pieces are balanced, and everything can fall and break any minute, especially in a country striken by daily earthquakes. The towers clearly stand as conceptual containers, metaphoric and symbolic vessels. Unstable yet formally and conceptually assembled and strong, the pieces will evolve, from one

De Vries usually repairs, rebuilds and reinvents, but here he embraces a pure and conscious act of sculpture. Breaking free, breaking loose, somehow, from his very first pieces, and finally breaking Tschiember’s Folded Space mirror, part of the previous exhibition. Not really a collaboration, but an exquisite corpse, de Vries plays along with an “incidental” and curatorial legacy. He usually gives life to what others have broken, but he felt the urge this time to experiment the Beauty of Destruction himself, to feast on it. The exhibition Pieces formally echoes Escapade, the Perrine Lievens’s opening exhibition, and answers the statements of Morgane Tschiember’s Folding Space and Soshi Matsunobe’s Direction of Materials. Pieces is also the last chapter in Super Window Project’s first location, and the last piece of its 2007-2010 program, built from drifts, shifts, resonances, parallelisms, oppositions, contradictions, within the context of a project room located on the northern and secluded hills of Kyoto.

Born in 1960 (Netherlands), Bouke de Vries lives and works in London.

BOUKE DE VRIES GUILLAUME LEINGRE PERRINE LIEVENS SOSHI MATSUNOBE MATHIEU MERCIER SANDRINE PELLETIER MORGANE TSCHIEMBE ARTISSIMA 17 11.05-07/10

The Gallery

y Is Closed

CLOSED LG WILLIAMS 11.19/10-01.09/11 Super Window Project is pleased to announce CLOSED, the first solo show in Japan by the Arkansas raised (Go Hogs!) artist LG Williams (born post 1969) / Estate of LG Williams (established ’96). The closed exhibition will run from November 19th through January 9th. Williams will not present anything new, or anything old, at Super Window Project, in fact he will not present anything at all, period. He will simply close this seminal Kyoto art gallery for the month of this landmark exhibition. So much could be written about CLOSED during these globally dark times when everything appears to be closing, but given that the gallery will be closed it doesn’t really make much sense to write about something nobody will see anyway, does it? No, not really. This exhibition will close Super Window Project from November 19th through January 9th. On the other hand, so much could be written about the inspiration behind CLOSED, about the theories of French philosophy or German mathematics or Zen cooking. Indeed the artist has written extensively elsewhere on the subjects as they relate to this artwork, but given that the gallery will be closed it doesn’t really make much sense to write about something nobody will see anyway, does it? No, not really. This exhibition will close Super Window Project from November 19th through January 9th. Likewise, so much could be written about LG Williams/Estate of LG Williams unprecedented visual and conceptual experiments (actually pseudo-experiments, given LG Williams/Estate of LG Williams adolescent habit of using hyperbole to Donald Duck Trump ‘Science’); experiments into the nature of nature, nurture, reality, space and perception (Note To Editor: I’m missing a few topics here so feel free to ad lib random bits of learned bserudition), all the while provoking viewers to enter the doors to Super Window Project which will be CLOSED, (gotcha!), but given that the gallery will be closed it doesn’t really make much sense to write about something nobody will see, does it? No, not really. This exhibition will close Super Window Project from November 19th through January 9th.

Finally, so much could be said about the creation of the void or infinity through specific closure techniques (Williams has recently been quoted as saying “tricks are for kids”) and displacements of reality, in-between spaces, developing structures and layers of this and that wowie-zowie or, if you rather, abracadabra black magic by the Dark Lord himself, but, given that the gallery will be closed it doesn’t really make much sense to write about something nobody will see, does it? No, not really. This exhibition will close Super Window Project from November 19th through January 9th. The exhibition catalogue will feature texts by curator Baron Osuna and art historian Julia Friedman as well as LG Williams’/Estate of LG Williams own incredible — in fact really fucking incredible — selection of literary, philosophical, and historical-theoretical texts that he was sleeping next to while making this exhibition. But, given that the gallery will be closed it doesn’t really make much sense to write about something nobody will see, does it? Not really. CLOSED runs from November 19th through January 9th. Born in 1965 (USA), LG Williams lives and works in Los Angeles, Honolulu and Kyoto.