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Keiji Uematsu. Looking on the past from the future

Keiji Uematsu. Looking on the past from the future : Keiji Uematsu Seeing II - Flower, 1975 série de 3 photographies, Tirage argentique Chaque image : 40 x 50 cm, encadrement : 41 x 51 cm Exemplaire N° 2/4 © Keiji Uematsu courtesy baudoin lebon   


The exhibition


Often associated with the Japanese avant-garde group Mono-ha, Keiji Uematsu shares with the proponents of the "school of things" the desire to create a dialogue between natural and manufactured objects. Moreover, it is to favour the process over the result of creation that the native of Kobe has been committed since the end of the 1960s, engaging his own body without making it the centre of his work. Playing with the measure that the body can give to things as much as with the neutrality of the camera's gaze, Uematsu makes them the instruments of numerous attempts to show the forces linking and unlinking object and space, gesture and body. But it is as a sculptor that he apprehends these performances, which find their culmination in the form of photographic polyptychs or videos between 1973 and 1977, as well as in his works on paper and volume pieces resembling precarious assemblages later. The same is true of a stone, which he uses indiscriminately as a wedge in a drawing or in a sculpture, representing it in the first case or using it directly in the second. For in Keiji Uematsu's work, and particularly in his photographic work, the idea that the image of a thing and the physical thing have the same properties seems tangible. This is why gravity, the phenomena of attraction, the whole process that makes the work stand up are visible. Working with the artist since the 1980s, Baudoin Lebon Gallery is showing a body of work spanning five decades, including four photographic series from the 1970s.

Extract from Tom Laurent's article published in the N°106 of the magazine Art Absolument. Published on 17 May 2023.

When


13/04/2023 - 03/06/2023

Artists