Naoya Takahara
(Ehime, 1954)
Naoya Takahara was born in Ehime, Japan, in 1954. He attends the Tama University of Art in Tokyo where he knows, thanks to Lee Ufan, the Mono-ha (literally: The world of things) movement developed around 1969-1970, whose research is focused on observing the pure aesthetic dimension of objects, considered in their essential physicality. Since 1976 he leaves Japan and travels through Europe. In these years Takahara's aesthetic research becomes wider till facing the matter of the plastic object, of the painting and of the surface. At the end of 1970's he definitively moves to Italy, at Rome. The main influences of this period are Giulio Paolini and Piero Manzoni's Conceptual Art and the artists of the Piazza del Popolo's School, namely Sergio Lombardo, Maurizio Mochetti e Tano Festa. Behind several kinds of experiments the prevalence is still given to the interest for the matter and for the object in itself. Takahara tends to change into things also geometrical figures and elementary plastic volumes, through the ideation of "plastic conceptual concepts" (S.Lux) attempting to understand the ambiguous relationship between image and object, reality and us. The relationship between reality and image, or reality and illusion, is the core of the artist's research. Takahara searches through the ambiguity of the "expressive play" to involve the observer, in some kind of exchange not only intellectual but also poetical and emotional. Among the main exhibitions are to be recalled the solo shows at the Bianca Pilat gallery in Milan and at the Sala 1 in Rome, and the collective exhibitions of 1991 at Palazzo Braschi and of 1992 at the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, in Rome, the Incantesimi: Scene d'arte e poesia in Bomarzo between 1995 and 1997, and in 2000 and 2001 at the Galleria Comunale d'Arte Contemporanea. In 2003 another solo exhibition at the Museo Laboratorio of the Università La Sapienza, in Rome.
