From August 6 to 17, Zen Foto Gallery presents Kanaria’s “à la recherche d'un point de
contact”, the sixth solo exhibition by the artist at the gallery. The exhibition features
approximately 30 recent paintings created using mixed media; oil paintings with coloured pencils, as well as copper plate prints with colouring, a method she has begun to use in the past year.

Let forms meet each other! To let them connect to each other. This form and that form
The act of making contact
Adapting to society, fitting in with others, or to the situation
To synchronize. Keeping in step with another, matching the timing, adjusting the time
The act of matching
Making harmony, expanding a world view, gaining strength
Can also allow us to “know” something.

ーKanaria, June 2016

As Kanaria states, her works manifest the abundant love that she perceives in daily life. Various motifs emerge as her coloured pencil scratches the layer of oil paint applied to
the canvas. Her motifs include human beings in intimate moments between woman and man, woman and a woman, or among a man, a woman, and another man. Fruits, cakes, adorable animals and profusely growing plants, the organic motifs are overlapping, connecting and given to life in a world that appears as an amusement park, a wonderland, or the ethereal sphere. With a new insight that the space between objects allows a work to be in contact with another plane or environment, she leaves a space between divided parts of her painting
wider than her past works, in which the parts fitted closely alongside each other. This attempt echoes the blank space that appears in her works, which suggest connections of
things or events. The exhibition which Kanaria conceived under the title à la recherche
d'un point de contact presents her new world view - in which the contact engenders a
new relation, allowing the world to become ever stronger, as well as the contact that
brings about a broader expanse of the world.

Artist Profile

Kanaria

Born in Osaka, 1987, Kanaria graduated from Tama Art University Tokyo in 2011 with a specialization in oil painting. She moved to Paris in 2014 and obtained her postgraduate diploma at Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2017. After participating in the artist residence program at Cité Internationale des Arts, she moved back to Japan in 2020. Kanaria has been actively participating in exhibitions in and out of Japan. Ever since her first solo exhibition at Zen Foto Gallery in August 2011, Kanaria has held solo exhibitions every summer at the gallery. This year marks the 13th time of our collaboration.