White Stone Karuizawa will be hosting Suzuna Iwasa's first solo exhibition at White Stone from Saturday, September 9th.
"Drawing・Morphogenesis"
　- Until the plants growing from the deer's head bloom and the scenery appears -




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At first it was just a single line. A stumbling pen, a brush that had fallen off, a dripping drop, a smudge on the paper - by embracing these accidental phenomena rather than rejecting them, an "image" or "shape" is born.

The traces of the lines can be seen as butterflies, landscapes, patterns of trees, rivers, and minerals, and as they are connected and become components, new "images" and stories are spun out. The unknown "images" have symbolic meanings, like intersecting scenes where foreshadowings intertwine, and there one can see a multi-layered world with a freely adjustable scale from both microscopic and macroscopic perspectives.

Encountering them is fun, as if I were looking at an uncontrollable life form. The branching lines of the fractal structure seen in "blood vessels" are also related to "branches," "rivers," "leaf veins," "feathers," "roots," and "horns," and to me they are, so to speak, the "shape of life."

In the painting, the antlers of the deer turn into the stems of plants that carry water, and then into the veins of leaves, forming a landscape. Wordplay and palindromes are created by conjuring up various images from the sound of "kami", such as paper, god, hair, kami, mamoru, and bite.

"Ah!" is surprise, "Ah" is recognition and demand, and "ame" brings to mind candy, rain, and the sky. Each sound of the Japanese syllabary, and the combination of these sounds, creates further images.
Just as new spirit resides in each word, each painting is made up of individual images, their combinations and relationships, and each one feels as if it has a life of its own.

This is an animistic worldview that holds that "every plant and tree has the ability to speak."
And perhaps I too am playing with visual links between lines and shapes.

So like butterflies become butterflies, and birds become birds,
The painting takes care of itself.
- Iwasa Suzuna
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We are looking forward to your visit.

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