Exhibition Review: Expo_025 Eva by Toshio Shimamura

Eva #01 , ©Toshio_Shimamura, L'Angle photographies

By Sara Beck

With his upcoming exhibition at L’ANGLE gallery in Hendaye, France, Toshio Shimamura will present a series of still lifes that makes flowers feel much larger than life. The images’ vibrant textures are their defining feature, from the beautifully captured translucent petals of an iris to the prickly, down-covered stem of a sunflower. In each photograph, one specific feature comes into focus in a seamless way while the remainder of the flower becomes muted or darkened. Shimamura utilizes an interesting play between light and shadow to fully realize this effect, and the result is a still image which somehow manages to dramatically come to life before the eyes of the viewer. 

Flowers have remained highly symbolic throughout human history for a variety of reasons. They are viewed as the epitome of beauty’s transient nature—in bloom for a season and then lost to time forever. With his classic silver prints, Shimamura immortalizes their allure and emphasizes their most miniscule features, ones we tend to overlook. These images, then, might be considered a testament to the brutality of time, as they simultaneously immortalize their subjects in their prime while also serving as a reminder that what is captured is ultimately short-lived. 

Eva #05 , ©Toshio_Shimamura, L'Angle photographies

The exhibition’s title is Eva, a title Shimamura explains with the same intrigue and mystery flowers are often made out to possess:

"One day I met Eva. She had such an angry expression and seemed so scared that it frightened me. Wasn't she going to come out of the black drawing I had in front of me that represented her?

Eva #10 , ©Toshio_Shimamura, L'Angle photographies

When later I began to look at the print of a sunflower photo, it was Eva again who appeared to me, it was the sunflower, tormented, her hair as if blown down by the wind, on a stormy day. This meeting of a universe that melts into another, these two images that secretly speak to each other, this "Eva-Tournesol" produced in me a surprise but also a silent joy. 

This is the beginning of this series of photos...

Eva #04 , ©Toshio_Shimamura, L'Angle photographies

Little by little light appears, a lot of light until saturation. The flowers turn into silhouettes, and minute details, imperceptible to the naked eye, are discovered as if the eye were a microscope to enter the threshold of the invisible. On the way to "withering", subtleties of colour and expression. Dance movements that express joy, sadness, perhaps a call from death. Or immobile postures that remind us of the dance Butō, "dance of the dark body". I melt into the vegetal, which has become hallucinatory and dangerous. Then I move away, the photos become more abstract, like deep black ink spots until the image disappears."

Eva will be on view from December 17th, 2020 through January 30th, 2021.

L’ANGLE Gallery

6 Rue des Citronniers 

64700 Hendaye, France