 |
|
"Touching the Time"
in the Mercati di Traiano in Rome Lucrezia Ungaro Manager of Mercati di Traiano, Museo dei Fori Imperiali |
|
"Touching the Time". Is it possible to "touch" the time? The title of the exhibition of sculptures by Kan Yasuda is extremely poetic. Immaterial. Evocative. Rationally unacceptable: the verb to touch indicates an action directed at something tangible, while time is quintessentially immaterial. So this association between a material verb and an untouchable dimension indicates a relationship of communication, of transcending of a boundry. The initial question remains, and we wonder about the deep reason that has prompted master Kan Yasuda to choose this title. And what the artist's answers might be; and those of his direct interlocutors, that is, the visitors who will be attracted - or even repelled - by this image. First of all, the artist's origin. Master Kan Yasuda comes from Japan, and he has set his works in the green and blue gardens of the Land of the Rising Sun. The context, therefore, is the spaces of ageless, timeless nature : the land of mother earth, placed on which are silvery metal "stones", the immovable mirrors of water on which white, smooth pebbles are reflected, the grassy carpets stretching to the horizon and cut vertically by white roads that lead to monumental square structures, but open onto the endless greenery. Earth-sky, timeless elements. The spaces call the forms. And the works are pure, rounded, clear forms, smoothed by time, rendered uncontaminated by the time that flows over them; or square, hard, angular, like the monolithic masses of the earth, but with openings, narros cracks or elongated windows, freeing the material in space, releasing its essence from the closed block. The white colour of the marble and the dark colour of the metal alternate; they are made bright and blinding by the rays of the Sun. Touching the surface of the works allows you to perceive the substance of the material, the work of man; sitting or lying on some of them makes you feel the physical relationship between our bodies and lines that the material has taken on, shaped by the artist. To find the whiteness of the statuary marble, Kan Yasuda moved to Pietrasanta, the area where the material from before the existence of man is extracted and worked by man to become an object. And the landscape and material of the western Land of the Sun have produced other forms, other corporeal connections between form and space, and, above all, between the space that becomes location and man. Sculptures are always conceived to be in the open air: but from the unique dimension of nature in Japan the artist goes on to conceive the works for home contexts: in Italy, the space is anthropologized, man is the centre of the universe and has built the cities. "Open-air sculptures", therefore, become, "sculptures in the cities". And the most emblematic cities in Italy are: Florence, the centre par excellence of the architecture and culture of the Renaissance, the age of Man. And Rome, the urbe, the city of emperors and popes. The city against which all measure themselves, but only when they are in full maturity, and feel ready to not be crushed by it. And, in Rome, the works of Kan Yasuda are welcomed in the Mercati di Traiano. In the complex of buildings that rise from ground level towards the sky, stretching out onto the slopes of the Colle Quirinale and hiding with clever architectural solution the cutting into the rock by the Romans to obtain further space for the monumental Foro di Traiano. A changed space, therefore, forcefully adapted and modelled by the ancients, to suit the public space par excellence of men, the forum. ...more |
 |