On Friday, 22 March 2019, Spazio Damiani will be inaugurating Seduction, the personal exhibition of work by the Japanese photographer Kenro Izu. Until 31 July 2019, fifteen images from the Still Life series created between 1991 and 2017 will be on display.
The works selected for this exhibition are taken from the four sections that comprise the series: Flora, Body, Blue and Orchard. Elegant and sinuous, the subjects of Kenro Izu’s photographs are flowers, fruits, body figures, and compositions of objects with a metaphysical flavour. Particular mention should be made of the two Cyanotypes over Platinum print taken from the Blue section, a tribute by the artist to Pablo Picasso’s Blue Period. Thanks to the technique used of multiple layers of cyanotype over platinum, a unique method developed by Izu, the abstract forms of the female body emerge from the blue colour and from the deep shadows of the platinum.
According to Izu, objects and bodies are endowed with an intrinsic spiritual essence; the meditative study of the subject using the aesthetics of still life enables the artist to grasp this essence. This is therefore a, slow, meditative creative process, which inevitably results was triggering an act of seduc-tion between the artist and the subject observed.
Izu’s aesthetic is rooted in traditional Japanese culture which, among its many unique features, assigns a very different role and value to the phenomenon of shadows to that current in Western culture. While here it is light that embodies the positive value and its absence is a lack, in Japan the shadow is that which, like light, contributes to the definition of bodies, objects and spaces. The interest and the fascination that shadows exert on Kenro Izu lies at the base of the whole Still Life series.
In the artist’s creative process, the printing technique also plays a crucial role. Thirteen of the fifteen photographic works that will be exhibited are Platinum/Palladium prints, the finest of black and white printing techniques. This technique makes it possible to create images with rich tones in which the amplitude of the nuances attains its greatest range, thus enabling the artist to deploy the play of light and shadow in all its force.
The Seduction exhibition is accompanied by a monograph bearing the same title published by Dami-ani. The book will also be presented in a limited edition that includes a pigment print made in 15 copies signed and numbered by the artist and entitled Seduction # 1045, 2016.
For more information please visit Damiani's website here