Drawing on existing material underpins the post-internet age, an age completely confined to images out of which multiple worlds are gradually constructed and then returned to us in just as many multiple interpretations, making them real and tangible. Being creative, especially for an artist, is an increasingly difficult task. The Japanese artist Kensuke Koike, who lives near Venice, is among those who manages to succeed in this endeavour, bringing together an interest in everyday objects and perceptual mechanisms. Not only this, but the means of production are also de-contextualisations of already existing ones, such as the now ‘ancient’ collage technique and photography, which were once experimental and avant-garde tools and have now been admitted into the realm of tradition.
In the one-minute video, Everyday is My Birthday, Kensuke Koike presents his work in a new online video gallery Flicks, curated by Valentina Tanni, embedded in Alberto Peruzzo Foundation’s website. This work is a subtle game of references using video and one minute space-time to reflect on processes of decomposition and recomposition. A postcard-photograph is reduced to narrow strips using an instrument normally employed to make pasta and then reassembled to form different compositions, in other words different resolutions of the same image.
«In the hands of the artist, the manipulation of photography becomes a magical process» declares Valentina Tanni. «The artist transfers the dynamics of imagination onto the physical artefact represented by the postcard. In this work we can also find references to the act of eating as a transformative moment. As Kensuke Koike himself explains, the inspiration comes from the pages of Alice in Wonderland, where the protagonist must come to terms with her body’s remarkable transformations after eating cakes and drinking mysterious potions».
The Alberto Peruzzo Foundation is a non-profit institution, established by the entrepreneur Alberto Peruzzo, which aims to promote contemporary art, while at the same time being attentive to and engaging in the restoration of Italy’s artistic heritage such as the Venice Pavilion in the Biennale Gardens, in collaboration with Louis Vuitton, and the small church of Sant’Agnese in Padua. Flicks is an online video gallery that transforms the Foundation’s online website into a temporary exhibition space hosting, in rotation, specially commissioned unseen works by Italian and international artists.
Kensuke Koike, Everyday is My Birthday, 2019, Flicks, video gallery curated by Valentina Tanni at Alberto Peruzzo Foundation
