Gianni Caravaggio, Valentina Perazzini, Natalia Blanch - Yamamo karate club, Brussels, 4 and 5 May 2019.

 

Valentina Perazzini wrote as introduction to the exhibition:

"It’s been a while since I have wanted to gather in a common exhibition visual artists who, like me, are also devoted martial artists (by devoted I mean artists that are equally committed to their visual as well as their martial art); therefore, when I was afforded the opportunity to intervene in a dojo, this event assumed its raison d'être."

Text by Valentina Perazzini

Pictures by Alessandro Costanzo

 

Delicada Urgencia, pencil on paper 62 x 80 cm and 100 x 200 cm each, 2019 / “When I see the eyes I have in mine tattooed”, thread dyed by hand and crocheted 9 x 173.5 cm, 2016.

 

Delicada Urgencia (detail) pencil on paper 100 x 200 cm each, 2019.

 

Next to the Kamiza (altar): Delicada urgencia, pencil on paper 39 x 58 cm, 2019

 

Delicada urgencia is a series of drawings made for the exhibition "Keep in touch". The title is from a poem by Alejandra Pizarnik. In her poetry, language (the extreme precision of words and form) opens to silence, to an interior space of a powerful fluidity.

In this series, I wonder specifically about disappearance.

Symbolic disappearance of the ego to let the work (and the movement) emerge. The dojos of aikido and meditation are the perfect places to become aware of one's ego and to modify it, from a selfish ego to a less egoist self.

Disappearance also refers to death. On the one hand I feel the urgency of the movement and I see unfold on the tatami the warlike origin of the techniques and its transformation into disciplines whose aspiration is the harmony between human beings. On the other hand I wonder what it is to die, and therefore to live? In the book The Spirit of Aikido, Kisshômaru Ueshiba writes: “It does not matter how long life lasts, it only lasts a second, renewed by our mind at every moment."

 

Delicada urgencia (detail), pencil on paper 39 x 58 cm, 2019.

 

Horizontal drawing: …the place, the wound where we speak our silence… Indian ink on paper 182 x 129 cm, 2016. On the wall (left) work by Valentina Perazzini.

 

On the wall: Delicada urgencia, pencil on paper 31,5 x 33,5 cm, 2019. On the floor: work by Gianni Caravaggio.

 

Reminiscence I, II . Indian ink on paper, 29.7 x 42 cm each, 2016

 

Exhibition view

Article "Où va-t-on se rencontrer" by Charlotte Van Der Elst