Kitai Kikaku, Ningyacho
Closes in 8 days
What is the role of the artist as creator in a material world already so full of unnecessary things? Ivo Sans, a Catalan artist and jazz musician living in Brussels, avoids adding to the mess by making his drawings, assemblages and sculptural works almost entirely out of found objects -- predominantly made of wood -- that he has taken out of their original context and given a new life as art works.
The delicate scraps of paper, broken twigs and slender branches which feature in his work are ethereal, and while they recall a number of western influences -- Joseph Beuys, Antoni Tapies and Robert Motherwell -- they are in tune with Japanese aesthetics. The Gallery Kitai (www.kitaikikaku.co.jp) primarily exhibits contemporary calligraphy artists whose work breaks with convention, so it is apt that Sans' first exhibition in Japan should be here: The thin, twisting branches of his sculptures look like brush strokes drawn in the air.
The starting point for this body of work came when he dreamed of a book intertwined with the branches of a tree. Unable to recreate this as a three-dimensional work, he has instead filled a sketchbook with intricate drawings of a sculpture that will never be; it is a visual diary documenting the lyricism of the unattainable.
