http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/2010/12/in-pursuit-of-less.html, Por Mark Feary

There is something quite confounding about Shinya Aota’s first exhibition at Aoyama | Meguro, with the installation and indeed the individual works constructing a simultaneous process of familiarisation and defamiliarisation. Upon approaching the gallery, with its vast street frontage windows, the site could initially be read as a minimalist boutique for designer objects. Swathed in fluorescent lighting the individual works are formally arranged at an almost architectural equidistance from one another, connoting the impression of discriminative availability.

Shinya Aota

Courtesy of Aoyama Meguro

Yet the works reveal themselves to be an almost banal assortment of everyday objects, with among other items, a baseball bat, a pair of spectacles, a football, a globe, and various vessels that had perhaps contained domestic cleaning products. This is not a Duchampian gesture of inserting the readymade within the gallery context, for the works are not merely found objects recontextualised to raise questions of aesthetic and institutional evaluation. All of the items within the project have been neutered in terms of their origin and in some instances, their functionality, with all traces of their surfaces removed beyond recognition. The works have undergone what would appear to be painstaking process of sanding back, erasing all trace of brand identification while retaining the sense of the form, as an almost Platonian gesture of idealism.

Shinya Aota

Courtesy of Aoyama Meguro

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