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The Container
1F Hills Daikanyama
1-8-30 Kamimeguro, Meguro-ku
Tokyo 153-0051 Japan   map * 
tel: +81 80 4172 2264     
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Love Me, Bomb Me by Pedro Inoue
by The Container
Location: The Container
Date: 9 Jun - 17 Aug 2014

The revolution will not be televised, but it will most certainly be computed.It will be hashtagged, Facebooked, and Twitted. It will spread like a contagious viral disease – crossing borders and seas, toppling governments, shaking financial institutions, and changing world order.

The last decade brought us the Arab Spring with its fall of political powers in the Middle East, the riots in England, Venezuela, Mexico, Lima, Spain, and the “Occupy Movement,” with its anti-corporate and anti-establishment demonstrations in New York’s Wall Street, Istanbul, Athens, and São Paulo.

There is a smell of change in the air, orchestrated through social networks, memes, and smartphone apps; through the publications of whistle blowers – Assange, Manning, Snowden; and through the cyberterrorism of hacktivists. There is a smell of change and Pedro Inoue is quietly lurking, taking it all in, inhaling lungful measures of it.

He has been waiting for it for a long time, spreading the word through his socio-politically discerning graphic design, where politicians, corporations, armies, and money feature heavily, calling for a social change.

From his commercial design to his art, Brazilian-born Pedro Inoue, is slowly plotting a revolution. He has shown his works in Korea, Japan, France and the UK, and collaborated with clients such David Bowie, Damien Hirst, and Ryuichi Sakamoto. For the last few years, he has been working also as the creative director of the socio-political magazine AdBusters. In all of his work, though, whether commercial or artistic, one can still find his unrelenting criticism of the world we have created.

His wonderful and delicately detailed Mandalas, for example, show intricate digitally-designed Mandala patterns, constructed from hundreds of corporate logos, to create a meditative patterns of optical illusion, bearing witty titles, such as, Long Live Terror, Military & Monetary, and Last Sale. Looking at the Mandalas from a distance, one immediately associates them with the intricate patterns that appear on notes, and the hypnotising nature of the images make one nauseated and uneasy.

Inoue’s graphic ability to collage hundreds, sometime thousands, of separate images into convoluted cohesive designs is admiring, such as his ability to beautify such banal and commonly recognised vocabulary of symbols and signs. Also his efforts to make his works accessible through the designs of a series of wrapping papers is interesting, rich in patterns and highly aesthetic, created from a portrait of Saddam Hussein (Saddam), the “Shell” logo (Shell), or airplanes and weapons (Terror). Only a closer inspection reveals morbidity, the hidden subliminal messages, and the irony.

One of the main issues arising from Inoue’s works is the relationship the artist has with money and his commercial practice, versus his practice as a fine artist. This contradiction brought in the past efforts to consolidate the two by means of expensive processes to produce limited-edition prints, using Lambda or Cibachrome, mounted in acrylic and aluminum frames. This was done to separate Inoue’s ‘inexpensive’ daily life in a capital-exchange world from his creative, ‘pure’ vision as an artist. It corresponded with Inoue’s concern for the polish of his completed pieces and his perception of the contemporary artworld.

During a recent stay in Tokyo, though, as a resident of Tokyo Wonder Site, Inoue came to realize that he was letting himself be guided by the concept of “adding value” to an artwork rather than doing what he naturally thought was interesting or the right path to pursue. This revelation brought the decision to produce a new series of works where the production focuses on the cheapest way possible to execute the pieces, blurring the lines between high and low quality and defying the idea that high quality maintains a natural correlation of opposites with “low”, inexpensive production techniques, perhaps in the vein of the 60s and 70s Italian Arte Provera movement.

For The Container, Inoue takes this concept further and pastes the entire insides of the physical exhibition space (walls, ceiling, and floor) with textures, optical forms and his Mandalas designs, to recreate the interior of the space. It is a sculptural installation of sorts, even though it lacks any three-dimensional objects. Inoue creates an environment in which the observer is forced to interact with the installation, a coerced performance art, where the visual, optical, and psychological impact on the viewer are the piece itself.

Although immaculately planned and designed, the printing itself is inexpensive and the tiling is rough, devaluing the idea that contemporary art ought to be expensively produced. The actual “paste up” technique he employs, using wallpaper paste, also recalls street art paste ups one would see in urban landscapes, and reinforces the connection of the work with the politically driven street art for social change movement of the last couple of decades.

*image (left)
courtesy of the artist and The Container 

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