Galerie Anne-Laure Buffard is pleased to inaugurate its new space at 6 rue Chapon by presenting a dialogue between the contemporary ceramics of Yoshimi Futamura (born in Nagoya in 1957) and the photographs of Pierre-Elie de Pibrac taken during a 8-month stay in Japan in 2019-2020.

Taking the name of a series by Yoshimi Futamura inspired by the spirit of resilience born from the trauma of Fukushima, the exhibition offers, under the title “REBIRTH”, a meditation on the feeling of impermanence which permeates Japanese culture and, ‘a more universal way, all human existence.

This notion of a precariousness of existence consubstantial with its beauty, is also the common thread of the Japanese corpus of Pierre-Elie de Pibrac which mixes color portraits and black and white prints recalling the Japanese tradition of Ukiyo-e, subtle art of ink and woodcuts.

Hakanai Sonzai means “I feel myself to be an ephemeral creature.” This immersive investigation into the Japan of internal exiles takes both a documentary and conceptual approach to photography. It was carried out during an eight-month stay in the archipelago, during which Pierre-Elie de Pibrac traveled the country, from Kyoto to the island of Yakushima via the underbelly of Osaka, the ghost town of Yubari or the sacred forest of Aokigahara at the foot of Mount Fuji.

Yoshimi Futamura’s Black Hole and Rebirth series were born from the trauma of Fukushima in 2011, experienced remotely by the artist.

In the Black Hole series, Yoshimi Futamura expresses this feeling of reduction to nothingness, caused by the Tsunami, by using the image of the black hole. During the production of the works of this cathartic corpus, the artist is inhabited by the ideas of concentration of power and explosion under control, two lines of force which evoke the tsunami and its consequences while offering, through transformation of ceramics by fire, a possible sublimation of the catastrophe.

The Rebirth series proceeds from Black Hole: it is experienced by the artist as an antidote to free herself from the torpor into which Fukushima plunged her. From this kneaded earth, Yoshimi Futamura brings out something positive, in order to continue moving forward: “a resilience drawn from the very earth”.