14 June 2018
XXVII International Exhibition "Art Meetings"
La Barbagianna: a house for contemporary art
Pontassieve (Florence), via di Grignano 25
PROGRAM first part of the review
Saturday 30 June, 5.00 pm - 10.00 pm
Personal Exhibition
Tribute to the 70th anniversary of RYOSUKE COHEN (1948-2018)
edited by Sandro Bongiani
Duration of the exhibition: 30 June - 25 August 2018.
Under the patronage of: Tuscany Region, Metropolitan City of Florence, City of Florence, Municipality of Pontassieve.
Visits by appointment
Tribute to the 70th anniversary of RYOSUKE COHEN (1948-2018) by Sandro Bongiani of the Bongiani Collection and of the Ophen Virtual Art Gallery of Salerno. In 1985 Ryosuke Cohen started the international project "Brain Cell" and in 2001 the "Fractal Portrait" project (face and body), involving thousands of artists in the field of collaboration and performance. In addition to the 36 works of the series "Brain Cell" (Brain Cell) from the number 966 of 8 January 2017 to 999 of 8 November 2017 of which a special work created specifically for the number 1000, in addition, three works are presented Fractal Unpublished large-scale portraits created especially for this exhibition in Pontassieve. A global project of participatory art carried out by Cohen for many years in the field of global art and performance. In many years of work, many artists took part in Cohen's projects. They periodically took turns collaborating with commitment and diligence with the Japanese artist. Ryosuke Cohen, born in 1948, Osaka, Japan, is a Mail Artist. The family name is Kouen but on the advice of Byron Black, he adopted the English name 'Cohen' as in Hebrew. Cohen discovered the mail art in Canada. Ryosuke is the son of a well-known haiku writer in Japan, Jyunichi Koen. Cohen's early works are the result of a mixture of Japanese tradition and imagery, contemporary numbers and icons as is his signature, the letter "C". For a long time the Japanese artist has been interested in the Dada and Fluxus movement, in contact with Shozo Shimamoto and the members of the Gutai group, sharing a new way of doing contemporary art in a spontaneous and natural way. Ryosuke is not the first Japanese post and marginal artist, but he is surely the longest-running Japanese author in the international network After Ray Johnson and Gugliemo Achille Cavellini, Ryosuke Cohen once again puts the cards of experimentation into an old-fashioned cultural system he prefers the work created specifically to be commercialized. This is done by proposing a particular project "Brian Cell" (Brain Cell), started in June 1985 with thousands of members spread in over 80 countries. a work that collects images of many artists on a single page every 7-10 days, attaching a list of addresses of collaborators coming from some countries 55 on average per work, which involved him for over 30 long years together with thousands of members scattered in many countries of the world, rejecting the unique work and customary concepts such as originality and therefore, preferring more play, research and the concrete freedom of the artist deliberately placed on the margins of the current cultural system. For this way of doing, he is perhaps the most interesting and active artist in the network of anyone else for the organizational capacity of the project and for the widespread diffusion of marginal art. In August 2001 he began in Italy the project "Fractal Portrait", making portraits and body silhouettes to his friends artists on the occasion of the various meetings held in different parts of the world; United States, Canada, England, Northern Ireland, Spain, Yugoslavia, Germany, Holland, Korea, Italy and France. Cohen is the contemporary artist who no longer represents the one who produces a work of art according to the old classicist ideas of tradition, but plays the role of mediator and intermediary between the realization of a project idea (his) and those participating in the project. Practically, he promoted a "doing" by becoming director of a temporary intervention, which arises from the contribution of others and materializes together in collective collaboration in which everyone can participate and be positively and passionately involved in the creation of the work. In over thirty years of work he has exhibited with exhibitions and performed performances and meetings in different geographical areas of the world. He lives in Ashiya-City Hyogo in Japan.
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