Yasuhiro Ishimoto – A scenography at LE BAL under influence – By Cyril Delhomme
“The photographs unfold with minimalist restraint in a very beautiful scenography in the form of a maze on two floors. A string of legs in contrapposto, framed in such a way as to extract the textures of the skin and the shapes of the flesh like patterns. […] However, the exhibition does not fall into the trap of Japanese fascination. It gives the sensation that this rigorous photographer is never as interesting as when he brings into dialogue the immutability of his compositions, always drawn with a straight line, and a principle of visual distortion.” – Rémi Guezodje, Libération
In the exhibition at LE BAL, the choice of 169 prints, most of them vintage and printed by Ishimoto himself, focuses on the first decades of his work, between Chicago and Japan. The scenographic challenges of the presentation of Ishimoto’s work at LE BAL were multiple, notably magnifying in space remarkable period prints but in small formats and staging the back and forth of his journey between Chicago and Tokyo that the spectator had to follow without losing the thread. The centerpiece of Ishimoto’s work created in Katsura would occupy a central place on the route. The design was to evoke the singularity of the 17th century imperial villa, as seen through Ishimoto’s “prism of modernity”.
So I first imagined for the scenography a graphic design from the influences of Ishimoto, the Bauhaus school, the city of Chicago and his Japanese culture. Lines, different heights, solid colors in a raw Bauhaus style to suggest an urban environment, browns “roots” for Chicago blues and a deep, silent, twilight blue for post-war Japan. The Katsura villa is presented in the exhibition as a revelation, that of traditional Japanese architecture, several centuries before the Bauhaus. The elements of classic Japanese interior architecture guided the design (the sliding and thin Shōji, the tatami format, the square space). The circulation plays on the back and forth of the viewer between the United States and Japan, the coming and going of cultures carried and sublimated by Ishimoto.
By Cyril Delhomme, scenographer of LE BAL.
