Ittah Yoda
I think mango you say salmon
5 Feb - 5 Mar 2016
Annka Kultys
472 Hackney Road
Unit 3, 1st Floor
London E2 9EQ7
www.annkakultys.com
I think mango you say salmon
5 Feb - 5 Mar 2016
Annka Kultys
472 Hackney Road
Unit 3, 1st Floor
London E2 9EQ7
www.annkakultys.com
Images courtesy the artists and Annka Kultys
Annka Kultys Gallery is pleased to present the gallery’s first exhibition with
Ittah Yoda. I THINK MANGO YOU SAY SALMON features recent wall works,
sculptures, mobiles and furniture pieces created by the Tokyo-born Kai Yoda
and Paris-born Virgile Ittah, working together for the first time as a collective.
I THINK MANGO YOU SAY SALMON is the culmination of the artists’ recent
creative collaboration and comprises ten pieces that explore the subjectivity of
the human experience. As the exhibition’s title alludes to, collaborations are by
their very nature relationships open to issues of interpretation and potential
dissonance; in contrast to the singularity of the traditional solo artist’s sensibility.
Thus, in the context of the pairing of artists whose divergent backgrounds
(oriental cf. occidental; passive and reactive cf. expressive and initiative taking)
could be seen to embody the ancient Chinese philosophy of yin and yang – the
notion that apparently opposite or contrary forces are in reality actually
complementary, interconnected and independent and give rise to each other as
they interrelate – it is unsurprising to find Ittah Yoda’s work infused with a
fragility and ethereality that echoes the contingent nature of the collaboration.
Five of the pieces in the exhibition belong to the series, I THINK MANGO YOU
SAY SALMON. All are what the artists describe as “wall pieces,” that is, works
that while they are wall hung in the manner of paintings, have a three dimensional
aspect that takes them beyond the usual boundaries of painting and into the
realm of the sculptural. Created from combinations of powder coated aluminium,
gel transfer medium, silicone, acrylic, and silk, polyester and sport mesh fabric,
each work in the series features a colourful base image that is shrouded behind
one or more layers of translucent fabric. The effect is to mute the impact of the
original base image lending the works an airy and diaphanous evanescence.
In I THINK MANGO YOU SAY SALMON #I, for example, a rich yellow-orange
colour field is broken by a softly rounded shape of lilac silicone, poured onto the
aluminium in a process echoing that the mid-twentieth century American abstract expressionist Morris Louis used to pour his paint when creating his flat
colour compositions, and then veiled behind three gauze screens of sports mesh
and polyster. The brightness of the yellow-orange and lilac dissipates as the viewer’s
gaze by necessity has to pierce the translucency of the gauze screens lending a
soft and subtle ambience to the work (not dissimilar to the effect the layers of the
earth’s atmosphere have on the sun’s rays at sunset) and inviting prolonged
contemplation. The aesthetic is not unlike that of traditional Japanese gardens;
places where the viewer was expected to sit for at least twenty minutes before
being able to “see” the garden.
During the nineteenth century, Europe, and particularly Paris, was gripped by
Japonisme: a passion for Japanese art and artefacts. “Japanese things… conjure a
picture of a place where sensations are always new, where art pours out of daily
life, where everything exists in a dream of endless beautiful flow” explained the
artist and writer Edmund de Waal in his poignant family memoir The Hare with
the Amber Eyes (2010). In two of sculptural pieces in the exhibition Ittah Yoda
play with this Franco-Japanese legacy. TOYOTA (2016) is a gently rounded glossy
off-white sculpture made of polyurethane foam and silicone, its title invoking one
of Japan’s most iconic industrial powers, and its presence contrasts with the
very-French titled mobile-sculpture MARGUERITE (2016), a Brancusian wing
also of polyurethane foam, while also toying with the artists’ own cultural origins.
In I THINK MANGO YOU SAY SALMON Ittah Yoda have harnessed their fragile
collective to produce works evocative of Waal’s dream of endless beautiful flow