Keisuke Matsuoka
REFUGEES
Opening Saturday 7 May 10.00-21.00
Saturday 7 May the FABER art gallery presents the REFUGEES exhibition by Keisuke Matsuoka.
In 2016 the Japanese artist Keisuke Matsuoka won the prestigious "Followship under the Pola Art Foundation Overseas Study Program" award and thus has the opportunity to take advantage of a scholarship and artistic residency that will allow him to live, study and work in Rome for more than a year.
The sculptor, moving from the native land of the Japanese cultural and spiritual tradition, elaborates a multidimensional research, whose peak is aimed at focusing on an incredibly dark and, even now, evanescent socio-human reality: the reality of the refugee.
The REFUGEES project was born in this context.
The stranger at the mercy of events acquires the symbolic role of a modern human figure in the artist's imagination.
At the center of Matsuoka's artistic creed is the attempt to find, from a morphological-anthropological-cultural point of view, but also in the animistic-spiritual aspects, the figure of a universal man free from any component of gender, race, place that can specify or condition it.
In fact, Keisuke Matsuoka's research, acting between different and articulated dimensions of meaning, is exactly aimed, according to the artist's own words, "to discover the threads that bind all human beings".
The figure of the refugee becomes the prerequisite and paradigm for an analysis of the entire human race.
All this Matsuoka analyzes and retransmits it with his own art, he hands it to us in the form of a sculpture, takes the materials, models, transforms, destroys and rebuilds; as nature does, as happens to every man with his own identity, exactly as refugees are forced to do in the struggle for survival.
The exhibition is entirely carried out on site specific to the gallery spaces and the itinerary showcases a surprising technical versatility both in the sculptural works and in the exploded installations with a great scenographic impact.
A short distance from the gallery it will also be possible to visit a documentary section of the project, which, complete with older works, provides an exhaustive overview of Matsuoka's production.
“What is a refugee? What is a human being? I tried to create works that answered these questions and that shook the hearts of the viewers, even if they were of different races or nationalities. I wish my work could also speak to aliens using a common language, the language of art ".
edited by Cristian Porretta
from 7 May to 30 July 2022
Tuesday-Saturday 10 am-7pm Sunday by appointment
FABER art gallery
via dei Banchi Vecchi 31, 00186 Rome | tel 06 68808624
galleriadartefaber.com | info@galleriadartefaber.com
