Chiharu Shiota (Osaka, 1972) is a wonderful artist who weaves gigantic meshes of threads in space with the virtuosity and grace of a spider. Traces and memories that fade away are trapped inside it (keys to houses that no longer have doors, old shoes, wedding dresses, grand pianos...) as if they had become tangled in the skein of memory. The presence that exists in the absence, life and death, the fragility hidden behind beauty. These are the themes of a deep and poetic art that astonishes the world. For Shiota, people are born and die, but objects stay and carry the memory of those who used them. “I feel their human presence in the patina they give off. And this leads me to question what it means to be human. What remains of us when the body disappears?” asks the Japanese creator living in Berlin, who returns to Barcelona, this time to the Fundació Tàpies, after her presentation in 2012, by Menene Gras, at Casa Àsia. .
In this time, Shiota, who has also exhibited at the Sorigué Foundation and the Liceu, has gone from being practically unknown to becoming one of the luminaries of the contemporary scene, thanks to the exquisite installation -The key in the handy- which caused waves of admiration and made it immensely popular at the 2015 Venice Biennale. A monumental red cloud from which 50,000 keys hung from different points of the planet flying over two barges. On that occasion, as in Each one, a universe, the exhibition that she now presents at Tàpies, the artist uses red thread, the color of blood, a metaphor for that which identifies us and connects us with others. The artist fills an entire room with a swarm of threads that connects to forty chairs purchased at flea markets. The idea for it came to him when he saw Nuvol i Cadira on the façade of the Fundació. “When I look at them, I see people, all sitting next to each other, but everyone is a universe to themselves.”
Shiota says he shares the same interest with Tàpies when it comes to asking the big questions of human beings. The theme of death is also recurring for both of them, perhaps because, he reflects, both of us “have experienced the fate of experiencing a serious illness.” Tàpies made his first drawings of him when he was convalescing from a serious lung illness. For Shiota, the aggressive ovarian cancer that he was diagnosed with in 2016 made him pick up paper and pencil again, to work with materials that would last beyond his body and that in turn his body would continue to exist. Working with threads and wires gives you the illusion of drawing in the air. He does not need a canvas or a brush, but faced with the possibility of death, the evidence that his installations disappear after each new exhibition became unbearable.
Extremely shy, almost disturbing, the artist recounts her experience in a writing that accompanies the exhibition curated by Imma Prieto, the first she has signed since taking over as director of the Tàpies. “To cure me,” the artist recalls, “they removed my body, cut it into pieces, and put it back together. That has changed the relationship I have with him and, after recovering, I made bronze casts of my arms, hands, feet and legs. I wanted to scatter my body parts on the floor. The body is in pieces, but each specific part expresses more emotion than the entire body could convey.” Her feet cling to the ground, as if tying a giant uterus made of red leather ribbons (Get out of my body). And inside a display case, her cancer cells, turned into precious crystal balls, some covered in silk or surrounded by colored wire as if they were jewels.
