Exhibition Period: 16th Septembe (Friday) – 27th November (Sunday), 2016
Mon-Sat 11:00-20:00 (Last entry 19:30),
Sun 11:00-19:00 (Last entry 18:30)
Open daily (Except for store closing day)
Free admission
Organized by: Fondation d’entreprise Hermès
Supported by: Art : Concept
Under the auspices of: Embassy of France/Institut français du Japon
Incorporating plants, vegetables, fruit, insects, and microorganisms, the French artist Michel Blazy, who was born in Monaco in 1966, produces work in which he examines beauty and ugliness in the natural world and the cycle of life in a straightforward and poetic manner. Though Blazy has held solo shows at major museums in France and participated in numerous exhibitions in foreign countries, this marks the artist’s first solo show in Japan.
Blazy’s works, which presents the changes that occur in the generative process over time, do not have a finished form. As with the kitchen or verandah in a house, vegetables germinate, grow, and decompose, but this is like a small laboratory in which Blazy attempts to enhance these phenomena through his works.
In living murals made of cracked or peeling agar-agar, and an accumulation of orange rind rotting over a few months, Blazy depicts the mutable as a contemporary form of vanitas while extracting the flow of time from familiar things and unexpected colors and forms.
In Blazy’s universe, animals like snails and mice are sometimes tasked with collaborative projects. These living things, which tended to be eliminated from living environments due to hygienic concerns, take on new roles and behave in a truly eloquent manner.
Matter produced by civilization also exists here. While things that circulated as readymade goods survive longer than human beings, they are designed to have a short lifespan in the economic tide. One of Blazy’s series, in which outdated household appliances have become infested with plants, compares the lifecycle of commercial products with the innate time of nature while humorously depicting the fragility and vigor of civilization and existence.
The title of this exhibition, Living room, suggests a place in the house to relax, but it also evokes an image of a space filled with constantly changing life. Blazy’s laboratory, which includes a critical view of clean, stagnant gallery spaces, poses questions based on a democratic view of our civilization’s tendency to eliminate certain landscapes in the name of comfort.
Photo credit:
Pull Over Time (detail)｜2016
Photo: Le Portique / Simon Desloges