Ryoji Ikeda
I don’t know much about mathematics or sciences in general. Nevertheless, I appreciated Ryoji Ikeda’s works, which will be shown at DHC/ART gallery in Montreal until November. It is because they evoke the idea of the infinite, both throughout the notion of time and of space expressed by the flux of information from different fields of science, that the artworks of the Japanese artist are so fascinating.
Divided in half, DHC/ART gallery chose to show the videos in the secondary building and the bidimensional works on the four floors of the main exhibition space. The installation regrouping videos of the series datamatics was particularly hypnotic. Nine projections, one expending from floor to ceiling, were alternating the showing of information in motion taking different visual aspects. Linking sound and light, this installation permits the viewer to lose himself in the motion of graphics and the flux of numbers. It is our task to find out what they each represent: space, or maybe DNA codes? Whatever the case may be, the subject of theses black and white images formed of lines, dots and numbers, inducts a state of mind similar to being in trance. At a certain moment, all the videos synchronize to show images at a crazy speed: they hit our brain so fast that we feel the time speeding up or even that we blinked even if we didn’t.
Some of Ryoji Ikeda’s works are so finely detailed, that we are provided with a magnifying glass to perceive them. We become explorers of the infinitely small, in an almost meditative way, in front of these minimalistic abstractions.
About the artist: http://www.ryojiikeda.com/
About the gallery: http://dhc-art.org/
