Keisuke Matsuoka. Refugees

"What is a refugee? What is a human being? I tried to create works that answered these questions and that shook the hearts of the viewers, even if they were of different races or nationalities. I wish my work could also speak to aliens using a common language, the language of art."

Locandina esposizione galleria Faber, Refugees di Keitsuke Matsuoka

Born in 1980 in Japan, he graduated from Tohoku University of Art and Design and received two fellowships, respectively in the United States and in Rome, where currently (from 7th May to 7th July 2022), at the Faber Art Gallery, he is hosted his solo show, Refugees.

Despite his young age, Keisuke Matsuoka is already the winner of numerous awards and has already been the protagonist of various personal and collective exhibitions that have made him famous especially in Japan, the motherland of his culture and aesthetics.

At the beginning of his artistic career, Matsuoka's style was very closely linked to his homeland both from a cultural and spiritual point of view. With the journey to the New World and Italy, the artist makes a considerable detachment and begins to contaminate his aesthetics with the stylistic figures of the places he experiences, arriving at a multicultural and multidimensional investigation.

Keisuke Matsuoka's research investigates the entire human race and the threads that bind relationships between humans. A universal investigation, the search that every man carries out to find his own identity. Matsuoka starts from the analysis of the reality of the refugee and his struggle for survival. A human category that in the imagination of the Japanese artist is the embodiment of the modern human figure. Through the sculptures and installations of great scenographic impact, site specific, Matsuoka's aspiration towards a universal man without any component of gender, race and place that could affect him emerges.

The subjects that populate Matsuoka's imagery and who came to life at the Faber gallery are people who see neither with their eyes nor speak with their own language, they have no identifiable identity or characters. They are refugees, a parallel reality that coexists with what we live every day, unconventional like the faceless sculptures of the Japanese artist. They are people uprooted from their social context who embark on an escape journey in search of an identity that has been erased from their homeland. A sad cultural and social reality that for several years an increasing number of artists have denounced through their work trying to trigger in the viewer a profound reflection on human beings.

Photos made by Carlotta Ceccarini