Tomoaki Suzuki's Miniature Wooden Figures at CAPC Bordeaux

The CAPC musée d'art contemporain in Bordeaux presents Tomoaki Suzuki's exhibition from April 4 to June 1, 2014. Suzuki, who has been based in London since 1998, creates traditional figurative painted sculptures from limewood. His models are drawn from London's trendy population, reproduced at one-third life size (never exceeding sixty centimeters). In the museum's nave, seventeen small, impassive figures stand directly on the floor, each displaying a distinctive style that serves as a temporal marker. They affirm their presence while ignoring each other, exacerbating the surrounding emptiness and confronting an impossible community. Through complementary differences and confrontations, they enable a reframed, renewed contact with the space, defining their specific place and footing. Their reduced, tenuous presence prevents the visitor from fixing their gaze, instead encouraging multiple approaches—circling, bending, kneeling, crouching—to discover coherence, surprises, and enriching perspectives. The viewer must find the right distance, adapt to the sculpture, and engage in a form of temple—a quality in bullfighting that coordinates the movement of the cloth with the bull's charging speed. This particular relationship to space, time, and what opens to the eye and moving body unfolds only in echo of a constant offer of generosity and vigilance. Text by Didier Arnaudet.