Keywords:
Visual connection
Utopian
Akira IkezoeI creates works in diverse disciplines, including drawing, painting, video and performance, in relation to the balance between the forces we think of as outside or before ourselves, and the “civilizing” of ourselves. Visual relating can be an essential topic in his work. His work comes to form the methodology of visual association and the irrational way of seeing.
'Regardless of scientific accuracy, visual association has been important for us to describe the universe since before modern society. For example, worshipping rocks that look like genital organs as symbols of reproduction, the notion of taking photographs to steal an object’s soul or being inspired by shadow shapes on the surface of the full moon to make up stories. I see bricolage-like manners in these ways of grasping phenomena from our environment and am interested in our inherent desire to create relationships between similar characteristics.' (Akira IkezoeI, 2019)
He put the visual association process into the Icon-style painting form and created a series of readable images rationally and restrained. In these images, the established system of human society is disrupted and integrated with the ecosystem. When you try to read in one order, another sequence is also feasible. He challenges the literary narrative method and adopts visual narrative so that the viewers can freely arrange the images in the paintings. Although it embraces a graphic drawing method, these images automatically form a 3D space different from the actual space in my mind, which fascinated me.
In Ikezoe’s works, the human figure is presented as his alter ego and woven into a metaphysical and mythological context that depicts a timeless melting point between human and natural boundaries.
Bosch The Garden of Earthly Delights
This reminds me of Bosch's works. Flowers grow from people's anus, and people become a part of nature. In Akira's drawings, people and animals fuse to form new creatures, and people grow tails and hang upside down on trees. Human beings have returned to the primitive state, but none of this can be separated from the metaphor for social relations. From these images, I can see that he deeply understands the alienated people living in modern cities. He narrates with cartoonish humour. The creatures in the painting no longer adapt to group life, pink bodies and beasts, and the limbs look out of place. Those figures also reflect the hieroglyphic organisation of languages in Eastern culture.
There is still a discussion of the narrative of things in his works. His use of daily object elements does not stay in the imagination realm but focuses on the correspondence with people. Objects are still not divorced from real social nature and indulge in the world of imagination. In his creation, objects and works of art reflect their value by human reference, and there is not much difference between the two.
‘I see those found objects as fragments of the local culture that have been exposed to weathering and have lost their original functions. My aim was to create plant-like shapes by extracting elements, that look organic, out of them and re-assembling them. Then, by presenting them as a group of sculptures, I attempt to create a space in which we can’t recognize a clear borderline between human made and nature.’ (Akira IkezoeI, 2019)
Books and other resources
Akira Ikezoe. (2020). , from Akira Ikezoe: http://akiraikezoe.com/
