Opening on Friday, May 16 from 6pm
Solo exhibition at Galerie du Canon, Métropole Toulon Provence Méditerranée
Curated by Julien Carbone - Le Port des Créateurs
A breath flows through the exhibition. It doesn't impose itself, it passes, fragile, sinuous, at times intangible, but once you enter, it never leaves you. It's an ancient breath, made of erased tales, abandoned objects, figures slipped out of the frame. A breath carried by the Yôkai, those troubled and mischievous spirits of Japanese folklore, who appear here in a strange parade, oscillating between the sacred and the ordinary, between memory and metamorphosis.
Makiko Furuichi does not make characters; she lets them appear. Beneath her brush, the Yôkai are neither wise nor spectacular : they drift. They pass through paper, walls, and volumes without ever seeking to explain themselves. Their presence answers to no order. It floats. It insists gently, like a thought we believed forgotten, yet which returns, insistent, in the depths of intuition.
Watercolours, engravings, suspended drapes, inflatable forms, murals: nothing here is frozen, nothing can be captured in a single glance. The exhibition breathes at its own pace, slow, drifting, sometimes retreating. The Mikoshi, a Japanese shrine traditionally carried in procession, becomes here a sort of flickering altar for objects on the run, the collective memory of a world where the sacred has been relegated to the margins of plastic and oblivion.
In places, glimpses. Animals, or creatures perhaps, whose reality or imagination we can't know. They don't really stare at us. They are there, calm, witnesses to a world we have stopped listening to. It's not a judgement they make, but a presence. Something that places us back, modestly, within the immense system of living things.
The work of Makiko Furuichi does not explain. It seeks neither demonstration nor resolution. It leaves things open. It suggests that objects have a memory, that forms have a life, that silence can sometimes speak louder than words. With tenderness and rigour, it proposes a new attention to that which resists the visible: the formless, the displaced, the erased.
A wind ahead is not a direction. It's a breath that comes before. What comes before the gesture, what comes even before the form. That fragile, almost imperceptible moment when something stirs, within us, around us, without yet having a name. An invitation, perhaps, to pay attention to what persists on the margins, in the murmur, in the tremor, in the waiting.
Text by Julien Carbone
