The latest pencil on paper drawing by Taisuke Mohri from "The Mirror" series will be presented at the "Personal Structures" exhibition at the European Cultural Centre (Palazzo Mora) for six month starting May 13th. The opening reception of the show is planed for May 11 (THU) and 12 (FRI). Please, contact us for the invitations if you would like to attend.
Taisuke Mohri, The Mirror 3, pencil on paper, drawing: 91x72.8cm, frame: 95.3x77.1x6.5cm, 2017
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Do you remember that common experience of being present in front of a picture? At that moment it opens itself to you like a window into another reality, presenting you with a landscape or a portrait, delivering one by one all the elements of itself for your admiration or contemplation. Whether with an aerial or a one-, two-, three-, four-point perspective, it might of course make the objects in the work appear to run from the onlooker toward the moment of vanishing, but, still, it doesn’t stop from making one thing decidedly not open to doubt: the picture is here for You. The work of foreshortening in the work is the flip side of the permanent optical reference to the point of view, your place. There is something in the nature of mirroring and worshiping here: it reflects the one who is facing it bringing its offerings to you. The Master.
Taisuke Mohri has another point of view to offer. His image is shedding itself, pulling away from the viewer: two mirrors, opposite to each other, open up an imaginary space and generate a run into an autonomous eternity – on that side of the image – by forcing your gaze to bounce in between them. It is in this self-referential, facing-itself continuum that you find a creature with overwhelming strength of presence. With both the time–laden wrinkles and goluptious eyes on its surface, as well as an explicit but indefinite conflict within, there is something from the category of that which is “alive“ there. This Being in front of the mirror is gazing at itself, while the image it sees is projected in the mirror on the opposite wall, and then back to the mirror in front of the figure and then back there again and here again and there again… thus excluding our place in front of the work from the optical structure and the visual field. The hyper-reality there is actually working on the hyper-absence here, generating a void right where we are. The depicted object is not there for you: it is busy with itself, within itself, with its reflections there – as a subject – while you, shamelessly, are not taken into consideration. With a separation that is so radical, with an opposition as strict, and with what is there being alive and present, then you the viewer have been eliminated and are absent, without any excuses.
There is one more thing, though. The mirror plane that separates us from “the other side” is broken. There is a crack in the optical border that separates the “Visual Experience” there and the “Darkness” here. Is light going through? Does the Being who is there suspect that I am here? Is it actually looking right into my eyes through the reflection of its own eyes? A connection is made, the link is working, and with it comes the alluring force that shifts my position with that of the complete being witnessing itself. Are we seeing Narcissus observing himself in the surface of the fountain from beneath the dark depths of the water into which he is looking. Stealing my imaginary autonomy, the subject of the work – that ideal “I” inside the mirror – is usurping the place of my Ego through this enchanting knot of reflections, discorporating “Me” from my place, extracting “Me” from the vacuum here toward the unity there. Taisuke Mohri’s “The Mirror” is like a door with a central axis that rotates what is being seen: it is you, on another side of the picture, looking at yourself.
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Taisuke Mohri, The Mirror 3, pencil on paper, drawing: 91x72.8cm, frame: 95.3x77.1x6.5cm, 2017 (details)
