[Title] Parallel Factory
[Artist] paramodel
[Date] January 27 – July 7, 2011
“Hermès is a company known for generating a prolific stream of creations, steadfastly supported by the unwavering skills of the craftspeople cultivated there. The studios where these artisans pass so much of their time are filled with the trusty tools of the trade, a rich range of raw materials, sketches and products in progress, which together literally well up in profuse spirituality. Herein lies an infinite slumbering strength, moving toward unknown forms, packing these working dimensions and waiting to be roused.
“Imagination and inspiration connect and intertwine from all directions. Within the pooling of such intuition, the Hermès creed certainly takes on a brilliant glow, moving on to crystallize in the form of exquisite creations. This hand-tooled brilliance, buoyed by the expertise of the atelier artisans, never assumes identical forms. The result, rather, is a kaleidoscopic world teeming with color and knowing no end, reaching on in incessant expansion and growth much like the constellations in the heavens above.
“Our unit, on the other hand, has persistently pursued the theme of the actual sites where products are created, together with the emotional highs, the fleeting circumstances and the permanence emerging from and generated within. Our keen interest in the small factories located along the streets of the district where we were raised comprises one such example. Such factory towns bustle with their own special clamor and electricity, reverberating in the hum and rhythm of machines that never seem to shut down. Rows of processing units, performing each task with unerring precision. In the immediate vicinity will be found drawings, prototypes and numerous other creations still at the image formulation stage. Behind all of this, clearly outstripping any form of cutting-edge technology is the savvy and manual skill of the craftspeople that command the tools. The factories themselves, in sheer essence, are vessels overflowing with the spirit of the highly accomplished workers within. The tools and machines, meanwhile, serve as mechanical extensions of the senses and hands of the artisans who wield them.
“In fact, there is a genuine sense that such factories have condensed the mystique of the very products created on-site, encompassing the struggles and turmoil as well, and harboring those qualities within. Viewed in the larger picture, such a factory may be imagined as a single steel-hard body in motion – a gigantic mechanized artisan expertly controlled by veteran craftsmen, magically producing part after part without pause.
“For all intents and purposes, we have portrayed the types of studios where craftsmen have toiled since days of old, together with the small neighborhood factory – the modern and mechanized metamorphosis of that long-standing archetype. Within these display windows, played out in the image of a virtual factory, two separate flows intersect and mate. They can be likened to the deep thorough bass sounds emerging from the depths of the tools and machines within the factory, and the cantus main melodies expertly performed by the elegant Hermès products. The query we embrace in this undertaking, therefore, is whether a new, unforeseen musical sound can be spawned in such space. Imagination, as such, transformed into an obbligato accompaniment and converging, with that playful musical interpretation extolling, in profoundly overlapping images, the know-how of the ‘Contemporary Artisan’. “
paramodel
paramodel is a two-man unit comprised of Yasuhiko Hayashi (born in 1971) and Yusuke Nakano (born in 1976). Both artists hail from Higashi Osaka, the traditional downtown quarter of Osaka located at the foot of Mt. Ikoma in Western Japan. Hayashi graduated from the Arts and Fine Art Division of Kyoto City University of Arts in 2001, with a major in Conception Design. Nakano completed his major in the Painting Course (Japanese Painting) of the Kyoto City University of Arts Graduate School in 2002.
The pair commenced their collaboration from 2001, and assumed the name “paramodel” in 2003. The unit’s keynote concept emerges from the “parallel” stances of the two members in pursuing their own unique forte domains and ideas, as represented in the name “paramodel” (poetic models and blueprints pieced together from various different components perceived from the world around and the heart within). Mutual disparities (parallax components) and correlations are mobilized in the creation of works in a multitude of formats, rooted in the central element of “model play” engineered by Hayashi and Nakano as a team.