NAGASAWA
INTERFERENCE
Site-specific sculpture and works on paper.
Curator:  LAURA VECERE

8th October – 31st December 2005

Intereference, 2005 Wood, lead and tempera, 133x1200 cm

Galleria Il Ponte opens its autumn exhibition season with a show dedicated to the artist Hidetoshi Nagasawa, Japanese by origin, Western by adoption.

Since the Sixties, Nagasawa has used a characteristic modus operandi: he chooses to create his works in situ, creating them ‘in’ and ‘for’ that particular location, in a tightly knit dialogue between the sculpture its surroundings, between the work of art and the space around it. Now, for the upper part of the gallery, he will create a site-specific sculpture entitled Interference. It is composed of a squared-off chestnut wood beam 11 m long and 30 cm thick, made of two elements which are cleverly locked together in the middle. The beam is supported at each end by other, shorter beams, which lean in opposite directions to each other. These support the long beam about a metre from the floor, in a magic equilibrium of opposing forces which seem to render this enormous suspended element weightless.

The exhibition continues in the lower room with a series of refined works on paper, one of the artist's favourite means of expression, often used by him as an actual medium for sculpture. Strips of paper criss-cross with strips of copper, intersecting in relational games between fullness and emptiness, light and shade. Sometimes there is a splash of colour, which, from the natural acid of the copper, spreads over the paper in variations of blue-green. This compact nucleus of works, dated 2004-2005, is produced on paper in a 100x70 cm format, with one larger sized piece, 210x300 cm, composed of nine modules.

Biography of Hidetoshi Nagasawa

Catalogue: photographed, 30x21.5 cm, 35 pages, 12 colour reproductions. Text by Laura Vecere, biography by Susanna Fabiani, Edizioni Il Ponte, Florence.