Daniel Arsham’s uchronic aesthetics revolves around his concept of fictional archaeology. Working in sculpture, architecture, drawing and film, he creates and crystallizes ambiguous in-between spaces or situations, and further stages what he refers to as future relics of the present. They are eroded casts of modern artifacts and contemporary human figures, which he expertly makes out of some geological material such as sand, selenite or volcanic ash for them to appear as if they had just been unearthed after being buried for ages.
Always iconic, most of the objects that he turns into stone refer to the late 20th century or millennial era, when technological obsolescence unprecedentedly accelerated along with the digital dematerialization of our world.
Painter, illustrator, sci-fi writer and manga artist, AYA TAKANO is inspired by all art forms, from erotic stamps of the Edo Period to impressionism, from Osamu Tezuka to Gustav Klimt. The artist has built a universe all her own. A universe made of infinite worlds, all means of escaping reality, gravity and its restraints, to attain a certain form of transcendence.
AYA TAKANO’s inner journeys wind their way into delicate works that convey a disturbing impression, somewhere between eroticism and impertinence. In a bedroom or in the metro, in front of the skyscrapers of a megalopolis or on the moon, naïve and androgynous girls are sketched out in thin, sharp lines. The artist’s mythology has constructed itself little by little, through her creations and visions of the unknown.
