Shimpei Yoshida - GAZE OF IMAGINATION

  

There is a motto at the beginning of Shimpei Yoshida's art: "being like something, yet not like that thing". "Something" should be better understood as "someone". Because in Yoshida's art only the human being, less the thing, appears. Shimpei Yoshida creates portraits. Portraits of people who were initially familiar to him. His new portraits, however, are of people unknown to him. He knows their faces from the internet and other anonymous sources. Here, Yoshida encounters strangers. Faces that he appropriates, empathizes with, understands and feels, even if there is never a congruence between objective understanding and his own comprehension, between perception and recreation.

When Shimpei Yoshida (born 1992) began his art of empathic portraits, it was friends and acquaintances whom he portrayed in bold oil paints. He knew them and they knew him. They knew about each other, whether children, family or friends. Now the course has changed significantly. Instead of painting with oil, he draws with fine pencil and in light pastel shades, with "muted colors". But more importantly, Yoshida now approaches the unknown, the house of bodies in which the person unknown to him lives with his individual inventory. For this too is one of his insights: "The body," he writes, "is only a house of words and memories." Now, his approach to the unknown applies to this house.

But how can we empathize with this house of words and memories? Is it possible to recognize the other person without knowing them? It is no coincidence that Yoshida called his first exhibition "serendipity": a procedure that presupposes the failure of the desired knowledge. But on this path of failure, other unsought-after paths sometimes open up, which enrich the desired knowledge with a different and unexpected discovery. His new portraits speak of such unexpected and "unsought" discoveries. They expand the personal identity of the individual by a second and hitherto unknown identity, with the artist's empathetic view of the "house" of the unknown other.

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EXTENDED UNTIL SUNDAY, NOV. 28TH 2021
OPENING HOURS ON SUNDAY: 13:00 -18:00

Realised with kind support of Stiftung Kunstfonds and Neustart Kultur.