Taro Izumi, a representative of the new Japanese generation, creates in a world reminiscent of the plays of Samuel Beckett, a place where absurdity meets slapstick, and that is often tinted with dark humour.
His installations transform their host spaces into great “bric-a-bracs” of images, sounds and objects, places where the artist sets up multiple dialogues with television screens. Using a camera, felt pens, or jars, Taro carries out all kinds of absurd or wacky experiments, staging the great and the very small dramas of human existence.

Sometimes, we need to lean down and look through a cardboard structure to see the artist being crushed by a giant hand like a fly (Lime at the Bottom of the Lake, 2006), or be attentive enough to see him swimming through a jar placed judiciously in front of the screen (Finland, 2008).
The frontier between the projected image and reality grows hazy; the artist plays with spectator’s senses.
“Since the video image cannot be transformed, I can always knock it about a bit. I try to create works that can be touched. When I press the “play” button, the images appear like ‘zombies’. In Paris I’m going to catch ‘zombies’ in the streets, in spaces, in the gallery’s nooks and crannies.”

Taro Izumi was born in 1976 and lives and works in Tokyo. This is his first exhibition in France.