Superposition Plus

Akié Archi Gallery is pleased to present "Superposition Plus", a solo exhibition dedicated to Japanese artist Takahisa Kamiya (born 1948 in Tokyo).

Metal seems to be Kamiya's guiding principle. Indeed, after training as a sculptor in his native country, our artist began training in 1976 at the National School of Arts and Crafts, metal section. It is indeed the metal that brings him to sculpture and not the sculpture that leads him to work with metal. In this we find in Kamiya all the original ambiguity that resides in the position of those who are called artists - this undefined frontier in perpetual movement, as a game of escape or dialogue with the craftsman. If we look at Kamiya's work and especially the way he qualifies it, we turn, turn around and find again the notions of assemblage and Superposition, since this is how he prefers to define his works, referring them to the sole plastic action and their programmatic dimension. One could even go further by summoning that of the bricolage in the noble sense of the term. Indeed, one finds in his artist's studio in Palaiseau plywood sheets, lead rolls, pliers, machines, soldering and cutting tools, an oxygen bottle, etc., next to a small shelf of varnishes and inks. In short, a universe that invokes more our imagination of the craftsman, the handyman than that of the painter - and then after all why not? By giving in his work a central place to the assembly, the Japanese artist replay the relationship signifier/signified. He questions our relationship to the sign, to language. He superimposes simple elements, of a non-referential register: plastic half-spheres, rectangles or squares of painted lead, geometric figures in ink, etc. But it is in the assembly, the bricolage, the superposition of these "non-significant" that the magic operates. There is a simple appearance of the object and a complexity (surmountable) of the glance to disentangle the sequential stratification of the assembly. This organization becomes self-referential and modular, it has a link to minimalism. But Kamiya's wall sculptures are ultimately more than just textures, colors, and reliefs. The solids and voids play with light and moment in an aesthetic of presentation and autonomous work. By referring to the string of the plastic operations, thus also concretely to the unity of the duration, to the present time which contains the past and the future, his works exceed the modern de-subjectivation. He shows us purely through his plastic language, the photograph of a fragment of a pond in Japan. On the surface, we recognize the first dead leaves of the season, those of last autumn that are still floating, and others too, darker, almost black, that go back to years gone by. In the depths of the clear water, the sedimentation of even older leaves can be seen, while the surface reflects the tall green trees. Kamiya's Superimpositions, close to Shintoism, propose a symbolic structure of this temporality where the past, the present and the after crystallize in one place. On another level, each of his works, dated, also continues to be superimposed on previous works and to relate to the work to come. Renewing his work, the artist proposes to us today in this exhibition to exceed, even to reverse his universe essentially composed of the black - kingdom of the shades and the light - to come in parallel to explore the white in all its nuances, like a new territory, a new glance on his assemblages. Throughout the exhibition, his monograph will also be on display.