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Takahiro Iwasaki

Glance, Object, Symbol
From 27/09/2012 to 01/05/2013

From hair, dust and other organic residues, the artist designs minuscule sculptures that suggest certain buildings that are emblematic of the capital.
Takahiro Iwasaki (b. 1975, works and lives in Hiroshima) makes sculpture using thread, scotch tape, hair, dust and materials found in the exhibition space. One senses the frailty of these constructions while their complexity visibly necessitates a great degree of dexterity in their realization. The simple materials crystallize into mountain ranges or monuments, built on an intricately small scale. Takahiro Iwasaki’s work give rise to a feeling of uncanniness, casting a doubt as to their reality. They are like suspended poems, prodigious parasites feeding on the edges of the ordinary world.

The new exhibition spaces in the Palais de Tokyo which remain to be explored are ideal terrain for the artist. Disseminated in corners, on ledges, and in gaps, these sculptures merge into their surroundings. Telescopes enable the viewer to pick them out, and confuse our perception of scale: though small and close-by, through the telescope his subjective reproductions of emblematic architectural structures appear to be huge and far away.

The Eiffel Tower is here reproduced at an intermediate phase of its construction. Frozen in incompleteness, in a manner similar to the dome of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial in the artist’s home town, it takes on an ambiguous significance: Is this a symbol of industrial growth or the anticipated ruin of our decadent civilization? “Glance, object, symbol, the Eiffel Tower is all that man puts in it, and this all is infinite” (Roland Barthes).