martine rey

My meetings with Japan are marked with mixed discoveries and intimacies: these forests of unknown ideograms like the narrative signs of Michaux, the garden of stones arranged like an offered landscape, a lacquer in the shade like a relic in a kiosk…. the elements meet in a common space at first ignored. I work in this space, which superimposes memories and gestures. This space that slips into the multiple layers of lacquer like submerged palimpsests. The lacquer marks passing time, it’s the link, the interstice of memory .

Through the technique of lacquer by its labor, its slowness, its preciousness, I find the time spent watching our mother “mend” with tenderness our clothes, observing the wind pushing the clouds, picking up these pebbles in my deformed pockets …

All these moments  finally bear a legend: the intuition of beauty is foreign to words, not to things.

I feel in deep harmony with the way the wear of time is magnified by Japanese art.

I found a path to engage my artistic work, a space-time that I continue to explore. The preciousness of vegetable lacquer – urushi – in use and place in Japanese space reveals the essential part of the sensitive. My work for 40 years is closely linked to this “object” charged with the “poignant melancholy of things”. (Mono no aware)