“We must invent an island, lost in the night when it is light here, or bright on the other side of the Earth at the moment when sleep takes us; an island which is but a memory inasmuch as it was real, with its white flag with a red circle like the setting sun; an island must be invented to listen to the rustle of cherry trees in the wind, and to watch softly every spring a cloud of petals like the rush of snow; an island where the vertical signs of the electric cities sparkle from the first vermilion glow of the twilight and thus accentuate its deepest mysteries; an island to see again the white powdered geiko of Gion district, the white gloves of the taxi drivers, the silk kimonos of the newlyweds of Izumo, the kyrielles of diaphanous umbrellas studded with rain running through the streets of Osaka or Tokyo and, on the north coast of Chugoku, the dunes of Tottori, which rise to herculean heights, where climb, on hot days, little figures in the shade of their parasols; to invent an island to to be dazed by the charivari of the pachinkos, to hear the roar of the Shinkansen zooming past in the plains of Honshu; to invent an island when one wants to remember the taste of sake in brasseries with brick- built chimney stacks from another time, and to find the smell of cold tobacco in hotel rooms to which, strangely, one ended up to be accustom, once overflown the northern lands asleep under the snow, the Siberian steppes caught in the ice under the blue sky night of winter, when, back in Paris, the day rises, it is necessary to invent an island to feel lonely and to believe oneself far away, and to regain the feeling of Japan that one does not resolve to leave behind. ”
Thierry Clech – An Island
Until March 16th
ARGENTIC Gallery
43 rue Daubenton
75005 Paris
www.argentic.fr
