KATSU ISHIDA solo exhibition in VATICAN
<Riflessioni> Palazzo della Cancerelia,ROMA,ITALY
thanks for Giorgio Carducci also Giorgio Vulcano
<critic> by Giorgio Carducci

When I was asked to say something about the work of the master Ishida the first thing that came to mind was the thought of how the artist perfectly embodies the spirit of Japanese art both for the technique used and for the contents, both for the philosophy behind its art. It is impossible not to notice how the master's works are full of life and anxiety at the same time: the bodies are massed, the faces are deformed, the subjects are both strongly carnal and incredibly disembodied. However, to dwell for a moment on the properly Japanese figure of his work I believe can help us to immerse ourselves in his creations. Precisely for this reason, far from wanting to be prosaic,

First of all, it must be remembered that for the Far Eastern man nature is not simply a scenario in which one is immersed and with which one interacts in an asymmetrical relationship in which man is at the center of the world. In the Far East, man is an integral part of nature and shares with it, even in his intimate fibers, "the sameness and essence of organic structure", to steal the words of the scholar Maria Teresa Lucidi. All the artists of the extreme world have painted nature since they are not simply immersed, but being "one with" nature. The same relationship with the materials used, mainly paper, ink and brush, is visceral, total, especially in the cultured and spiritual painting par excellence that for oriental culture is monochrome painting. The artists are one with their work tools, but not in a romantic, western, not well-defined desire for fusion, they recognize themselves in a sort of organic continuum with them, this is why the teacher Ishida fully represents the culture of his country in the relationship that I would call carnal with pictorial material , but also photographic and electronic because today our daily life is also made of these realities. The paper that he himself forges with very long times starting from the raw material, or rather from the plant itself from which he will then give light to the precious work sheets, fully represents the need for union with the materials, live tools of creation, and represents one of the figures peculiar to the Japanese artistic spirit. for this reason the teacher Ishida fully represents the culture of his country in the relationship I would call carnal with pictorial material, but also photographic and electronic because today our daily life is also made of these realities. The paper that he himself forges with very long times starting from the raw material, or rather from the plant itself from which he will then give light to the precious work sheets, fully represents the need for union with the materials, live tools of creation, and represents one of the figures peculiar to the Japanese artistic spirit. for this reason the teacher Ishida fully represents the culture of his country in the relationship I would call carnal with pictorial material, but also photographic and electronic because today our daily life is also made of these realities. The paper that he himself forges with very long times starting from the raw material, or rather from the plant itself from which he will then give light to the precious work sheets, fully represents the need for union with the materials, live tools of creation, and represents one of the figures peculiar to the Japanese artistic spirit.

There is a Japanese term, the KI , imported from the Chinese CHI(anciently the two cultures resembled much more than today) whose ideogram (氣) symbolizes the steam that comes out of the cooking of the rice to signify some elements that harmonize with each other, in this case the water, the fire of cooking and rice, produce something that moves, that has its own form of life, steam in fact. This word can be translated as "energy-matter" or the life force that permeates all nature and living beings. After years of hard work on himself through technique, in an abnegation that almost resembles the path of a religious - and I would like to emphasize that many traditional Japanese painters were not by chance also and above all monks - if an artist lets it flow harmoniously and smoothly this energy, he becomes a single thing with his own brush or his own work tools and transfers to the work that is creating life. This distinguishes a great artist from a mediocre artist: the vibrant perception of life that exudes from his works. Once again, although with completely different subjects and scenarios, the work of master Ishida is an example of this taking life of the things of the world, their vibrating, often their shouting.

However Ishida is also a profoundly I would say disconcertingly contemporary artist. The almost macabre massing of bodies, the anguish mixed with grotesque irony that ooze from his works (irony that also partly sinks its roots in a consolidated Japanese tradition) recall to my mind also a not a little painful experience of history of Japan of the last centuries: they basically recall the basic existential condition of the whole human race, reminding us that in the end we are all naked and helpless, fragile and after all never fully balanced like the figures that appear before our eyes in his works.

Perhaps no culture like that of the Far East in the last two hundred years has seen such a dramatic upheaval in its physiognomy: Western and American culture in particular have entered, let me say the way, with a straight leg in the delicate and at the same time martial Japanese culture, sinking its foot into a very refined and profoundly different tradition, at a substantial level. Many artists have talked about the difficulties of finding their own identity in the union between these very different cultural realities, and, in my humble opinion,

Japan is the country of Zen gardens and love for imperfect things, it is the country that loves to leave the raw wood and grow moss slowly on the stones, it is the country of the tea ceremony and of the adoration for the very delicate flowers of cherry and at the same time it is the country of the famous Shibuya crossroads , of the most avant-garde electronics in the world, of manga and trains that split the second: all this seems to echo in the constant bewilderment that one feels in front of the master's works in which tradition and innovation, in which past and future talk loudly.

It is not by chance that he coined the philosophical term yura yura that we can translate with the infinitive verb "to wave" to represent in his vision this continuous swaying of the human being between the vicissitudes of life and the world in which we are immersed, a constant, almost dissociated and dissociating uncertainty between our members of living beings that are ever more defenseless on the one hand and a technology that is ever more perfect and inhuman on the other.

But even here Ishida is firmly anchored in the traditional culture of his country, it is in fact only a few centuries before the famous Ukiyo-e painting that literally means "painting of the floating world", which arises within the great cities of Edo, Tokyo and Kyoto from the seventeenth century: it consists of prints that basically reproduce the pleasures of city life, geishas, prostitutes, wrestlers, actors and so on, not without scenes that are often sexually explicit. The term Ukiyo-e , however, has a curious homophony with a Buddhist word meaning "world of suffering", as a joking apology, then, of the condition of uncertainty and pain of the human condition, today a tragicomic aspect of contemporary life.

Japan is the country that has made impermanence a highly refined ephemeral cult, not understood in a Western manner as the superfluous and the superficial, but as a profound awareness of our transience. This is evident in the extremely central concept of the wabi-sabi for the aesthetics and culture of the land of the rising sun and which can be defined as an inspired acceptance of beauty that is expressed precisely in its necessarily transient, imperfect, and incomplete being , to steal . Yet nowadays the awareness of this precarious transitory nature of existence is not free from a connotation of silent dismay, between the cult of eternal youth and plastic surgery on the one hand and the anguished knowledge of our space-time finitude on the other .

The expressive power of the work of the master Ishida was born in my humble opinion from the fusion of all this, and like the Butoh dancers, whose naked bodies stand out laboriously in unusual and shocking poses, it sends us back a profound and urgent existential question, the overwhelming force of an art that has the gift of life.

Giorgio Carducci

"CFAD ALUMNI”.
College of Fine Arts & Design, University of Sharjah].
.
Alexis Joyce Javero.
Page 565 and Page 566.
.
Nava Rizvi.
Fathha (Aaa), Domma (Ooo), Kasra (Eee).
.
Doha Aboelezz.
Dwelling.
.
Dania Altamimi.
Wrestlers.

・Ina Mindiuz ( from 
RED FLOWER

HAMA-JI,OH YOO RAN, CLARA WOODS

ARTISTs

KATSU ISHIDA,MIHO ISHIHARA,HAKUSEKI IWAI,YUKI HARADA

ARTISTs

KOJI MINAMI,SENNin MAYA

SHINICHI SAKAMOTO,ERI HIRACHI,NAOMI HARASAWA,SYUICHI NAKANO,TAKAYUKI NAKAMURA,HISAKO OHKOCHI,

at SAN PIETRO,vatican,italy