Lundi 18 Janvier 2016 10:44:14 par Caroline Bertolino dans Expositions

Using existing images such as magazine, newspaper and found photo clippings as her motif, Kazuna Taguchi paints anonymous, imaginary women and still lifes with astonishing realism. She then photographs the resulting acrylic painting and, after a patient operation in the darkroom, produces a photograph which will be shown as the final work. Standing in front of her skilfully finished photographic print, a viewer will feel the strange yet irresistible sense of reality in the image. Her works veil the marks of her brushwork, and their photographic aura makes some of the portraits feel like pages from a magazine fashion spread. But in another sense, the ambiguity of their surface – is it a photo or not? is it canvas or paper? – positions Kazuna Taguchi as an artist who is not primarily satisfied with obvious readings of her outcomes.

KAZUNA TAGUCHI (*1979)
spilt milk
2014
Silver gelatin print
17.7 x 12.5 cm (7 x 4 7/8 inches)
Edition of 5; Ed. no. 1/5
© Kazuna Taguchi / Courtesy Christophe Guye Galerie

Kazuna Taguchi’s portraits foreground the act of ‘freezing’ her figures. We could term this effect a ‘friezure’ – seizure in frieze. As visible beings of post-human portraiture, all of the women appear to be in the act of becoming something else – something other than or beyond themselves. Caught in the moment, their faces evoke varying degrees of trauma – catatonia, withdrawal, delusion, desperation, mania, shock. Their melodramatic posture is heightened in a manner that hauntingly echoes late 19th Century photographs of women interred in insane asylums. Swimming in a fog of grey, the women appear simultaneously lost and trapped within the frame. Again, the blur between identifiable content (the women) and their representation (their photo-painterly rendering) queers any simplistic reading of the image. The women are marked as being somewhere else. Their presence is more ethereal than photographic. This is why Kazuna Taguchi’s elusive creatures squirm like they are interred somewhere within the fluid granular epidermis between the glass and the print.

KAZUNA TAGUCHI (*1979)
scissors and paper
2015
Silver gelatin print
17.7 x 13 cm (7 x 5 1/8 inches)
Edition of 3; Ed. no. 1/3
© Kazuna Taguchi / Courtesy Christophe Guye Galerie

The gorgeous ocean of wavering focal gradations across the forms of the still life’s and visages of the women – organically ordered in each print – is less an arty visual effect and more a drawing of the emotional aura of each portrait or object. Arguably, there is no real background, mid-field or foreground in these prints. In place, there is the mirage of depth created by the emotional aura. Their grey surrounding void and the surface amalgamates multiple energy fields – emotional, psychological, spiritualist, materialist – into a dimension of a fleeting existence. Their torsos-with-heads or cups hover like liquefied ghosts emerging from a swamp of ‘swimming grain’.