Toshio Shibata
After « Night Photographs » and « Boundary Hunt », the Polka Gallery continues its exploration of the worlds of Toshio Shibata. The photographs of the Japanese master, born in 1949, presented in the exhibition Archipictural, return to another dimension of his work: color. They are also a reflection on the level of reading a photograph.
« According to a conventional division, color is reality, and black and white is the idea of reality. One is to present the flesh of the world, the other to emphasize its design, writes Thierry Grillet, ex-director of cultural diffusion at the BnF », about him. « The apparent contradiction that fuels a color / design dialectic in the West (known to art historians as the Rubens/Poussin opposition) has no force in Shibata’s work. As a Far Eastern artist, he views contradiction not as conflict, but as the opening of a space where creation is negotiated between color and design. It is in this neutral interval that the work circulates. »
The title of the exhibition, « Archipictural » echoes this reconciliation of opposites. « Shibata is an architectural photographer with a compass in his eye. At the same time, thanks to his early training, he is a traditional Japanese painter with a delicate sense of color, explains Adélie de Ipanema, director of the Polka Gallery. He works with a large-format camera whose negatives allow for breathtaking enlargements. We decided to juxtapose the contact sheets of these negatives with the large formats. When looking at one, you move closer; when looking at the other, you move further away. This play on scale is particularly tempting with his work. »
The images themselves are carefully designed so that the scale is not immediately apparent. Are we looking at a miniature or something monumental? There are no obvious reference points. Shibata’s image plays on a Gulliverian imagination, where the viewer constantly shifts from the very large to the very small. Until they lose their sense of the world’s scale: the extraordinary resolution of the images allows the eye to patrol the photo and discover details that are unnoticed at first glance. The work does not reveal itself at once. It requires a slow, attentive approach conducive to contemplation.
Shibata’s journey, as depicted in the exhibition, takes us to sites of various shapes and sizes. Unlike his other series, which took us to Europe or the United States, this collection focuses on Japan’s dams. Nevertheless, the geographical feeling specific to Shibata’s photos celebrates the universality of spaces with features typical of the industrial era, wherever they may be on the globe. The same gigantism, the same brutality, the same indifference to the natural environment in which these engineering structures are located, these giant infrastructures in muted colors that resemble sublime abstractions placed by the 20th century in the landscape.
