Faux amis (fozami), by Frédéric Valabrègue

One sometimes arrives from elsewhere to enter a country to which one does not have the keys, and which could be called contemporary art. How can one be Turkish ? A peasant of Paris ? How can one be a philistine ? It is necessary to feel that Mayura Torii takes the point of view of the someone who does not understand anything. She feigns ignorance. She is aware of a particular situational comedy : it is a question of creating an understanding for oneself, an understanding of one’s own, while one is immersed in a world whose rituals and principles escape us. An amused double look at oneself : the awareness of an aporia and the desire to use a lacunar understanding to make it resonate with one’s own heritage. Where to find equivalences to this foreign world in my own culture and where to measure hyperbolic differences, antipodes whose gaps invite me to the vertigo of otherness ? The concept will be the most foreign world in the sphere of a contemporary art that is already in itself. In addition, it is the bridge of the most hackneyed asses. The status of philosophy is particular in the East. It is certain that Aristotle will never be regarded in the same esteem as in the West. But the good news is that for Mayura Torii language can object to what it refers to, move what it designates ; that the difference in resonance between the word and the object to which it refers can offer the same journey as between two geographies and two cultures. The conceptualism inherited from Wittgenstein puts language and referents out of their depth. From a hypothesis of this kind, one registers the misunderstandings, the false coincidences and the hiatuses. One adds doubt and confusion to the abysmal metaphysics of similarity and dissimilarity. Translation marks this same interval, this same gap that Marcel Duchamp designated as a place of investigation, a working tool and an operation. The will to integrate a culture, to enter into another language, forces the crossing of a void on which fragile bridges are built. I pretend to get it but I will understand later. The word game, its variations, its phonetic level are the objects of exploration and appropriation. Plurilingualism establishes a divergent system favoring misunderstanding. The multiplication of languages creates a spurious Esperanto. False coincidences ruin the utopia of the Tower of Babel. Polyglots speak glossolalia. There is a loss, a generalized collapse of meaning.

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For someone who, familiar with a language, awakens to an established meaning, the salt of equivocation is not the same as for the one who, caught in multiple echoes, takes everything at face value or by sound. Mayura Torii’s point of view is that of ignorance. The remark of the neophyte, the simple-minded or the idiot comes to disconcert the scholar. The stranger’s view at a value as statuesque as the ready-made is that of ingenuity. This object full as an egg with so many comments, let’s make it a small wool for the winter so it doesn’t catch a cold. Mitten for the sore sex of the seducer. Marcel Duchamp domesticated. The intervention is superfluous, inopportune, officious, touchingly incongruous. However, it is so appropriate ! Of course the Lady-mades follow in the wake of modifications, analytical or subversive rectifications of Sherrie Levine, Léa Lublin, Helen Chadwick.

Pampering the works of the Great Demystifier, not to demystify the demystification, but to cover his choices under a range of contrary and unexpected sensations : the handmade, the craft, the work of a lady, the care, the bandage, the tenderness "cute". The gaze of the innocent ( mischievous and playful ) takes contrary a veneration and chips it with catastrophic goodwill. The humor of the Master is turned upside down by the sense of burlesque of his embarrassing groupie.

Mayura Torii lets herself be carried by a floating incomprehension, a confusion of genres and values. She records this floating and this confusion, builds them, always in the name of a smile. She reinjects playfulness, a subtle joke, into the pontificating aspect of the concept. In this, she remains amused and skeptical of the Westerner’s overvaluation of performative thinking. She is not simply content with reminding us that there are other worlds with different orientations and hierarchies. By destabilizing without seriousness, she works sensations of joy and astonishment specific to each disorientation. Each one of these works restores to us the trouble of passage, the indecision at the threshold, the delicious thrill of a small mental border to cross. This work, which is based on language, explores sensations of strangeness and of presence more or less detached from reality.

Discussing together about translation in the broad sense, proverb against proverb, usage against usage, morals against morals, and thus the search for an approximate equivalence, we came to the point where I asked her how a housewife in Japan indicates that her guests are starting to intrude a little too much and that it is time to leave. Well, she replied, she turns the broom upside down ! I was terrified. It was so violent...!

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Décor, by Frédéric Valabrègue

Mayura Torii explores the misunderstandings of those who would be ’’lost in translation’’ as much on the level of daily life as in the various comments heard on the arts, misunderstandings fertile in humor and sharpening the critical spirit. Language is her first source of perplexity and invention ; the second, adjoining, is translation, which she has been obliged to make from one culture to another for a long time. Her objects, drawings, paintings, often accompanied by labels and titles, are conductive to word or image games, to sexual equivocation and nonsense. She shows how words taken for others detach from the images that are related to them. Thanks to these hiatuses, it is with finesse that she attacks the cultural and domestic patriarchal authority, whether it is the obligatory reference to the Great Artist or the man in everyday life. She does not do it as a militant but in the mode of bouncing objections which conclude nothing, especially since the doubt sifts her irony, which is the salt of it.

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Décor, gathering her latest works, takes the side of the most minor register possible. Nothing is more minor than the notion of decor and when a painter makes one, it means that he paints an illusion made for pleasure. Decor is synonymous with simulacra for those who think that today’s society is only a set of decorations, a sort of generalized Potemkin village. Mayura Torii produces paintings that are recognizable before they are seen because they stem from clothing fashion. She makes of them a metonymy of a group and of its uses at the same time as a geometrical pseudo abstraction. She confuses the codes of cultural recognition and brings them on the same level without hierarchy. She assimilates the gaze on art to a group identification, as happens with clothing brands. Is the place of a painting no more than that of a ready-made object in a decor ? Does it have the slightest chance to appear, while it is frozen by the ready-to-think ? Can it make its way among totalizing codes ?

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Mayura Torii’s satire focuses on the way art and anti-art create value and prestige. It is also on the paradoxes and inversions of a misguided subculture and an elitist and pretentious culture that her falsely candid spirit is sharpened. The lady-made are ladies’ works, knitting or layette, of domestic craft work. At first, they were supposed to provide a cosy cover for Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades, but they can still be used as a protection for those who buy their bottle holder at the B.H.V. (a multispecialist department store in Paris) Since their first versions, these lady-made have taken their independence from the Duchampian object evoked by a small silk-screen print where this one has been diluted. These knitwear, fingers of gloves, bonnets of giants or elves, they are of course handmade but the crafted object is never opposed to the industrial object. It accompanies it. It is not an opposition, but a contact and it is also what the thought knits with a concept. For example, the dissolution of art in everyday life and its paradoxical consequences. Also the latest lady-made recall in their presentation these images of internet catalogs where amateur crafters, calling themselvesr "ceators," show their creations for sale in the manner of articles in a store : caribbean mug, embroidered cushions and rastafari headdresses posted on request, objects whose unique characteristic is the claim ob being handmade. Is it a mistake to confuse the "fluxstore" with fancy goods ? Is it taking too sharp a look at the mores of an era to equate the economic solutions of casual creators with Tupperware clubs ? Isn’t a website the current alternative to the Lépine contest stand (French competition of inventions created in 1901) ? And why not rejoice to see some of the slogans of the old avant-gardes taken literally by those who have never heard of them ?

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Enfourcher la langue, by Sarah Lallemand

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It is under a harmless appearance that Mayura Torii’s representations attack the visible by making it grow like a hair on the tongue. This imperceptible work of undermining, in order to be able to take (us), is based on what is seen, known and known by all, namely the language and the visible which are attached to it. Simply taking from ingredients that already exist (locution, object, simple form, daily life, word, idiotism) Mayura Torii sharpens the meaning with a scalpel for a "readycule" conjugation. In front, behind, around, in the background of photographs, drawings, sculptures and titles, the spectator then manufactures at full speed, in "alphabetical" disorder, in the wrong direction as in all the directions, tasting a language which has become bifid which makes the visible lisp, anamorphoses the intelligible. This is how Mayura Torii draws her witty lines and opens us up to them, dusting them off with a caustic Witz.

The author of a voluntarily minimalist practice makes herself on this occasion "ôteur(remover)" of any personal touch, preferring to borrow from the commonplaces of the cultural which, picking there, digs and sprouts in the minde of the spectator. This voluntary withdrawal of the I actually leaves actually more place to for play, those made of sliding and interlocking, from chains of thought to the unleashing of sense from some linguistic and/or visual coincidences. Mayura Torii would then reverse the expression "he who can do more can do less" by a practice of the minimal but with maximum effect in the stumbles of (un)expected meanings, risking the good or bad falls like when it is a good word, speculating on the laughable or virtuoso catch-ups at the cultural ramp. For example, it is to count on a spirit of stairs in which we would be pushed that to methodically draw and cut into five sections of 50 x 55 cm a divided Vacuum cleaner : by a phenomenon of cascading references and resonances, this improbable and delicate mimetic polyptic would lead us from the vacuum cleaner raised on the votive altar of the consumed household to the broken aura of the Ready Made, of the sliced sheep of Damien Hirst to the dream of a housewife chopping up finely for better storing the swallower of an Duchampian dust breeding... The list would be as long as a screw and a never-ending unscrewing. Thus, because it slips gently, far from the spectacular and the effect of gesture - and this precisely often in the place of a technical rigor which makes illusion -, the machine goes off in all directions. Nearly a hundred years after Duchamp, the bride now rides with all the idiotic bachelors and gives reception with great art in the small kitchen of the banal where the High and Low embrace. The language forks (in) there, where the servant and the scholar copulate, in a bed as vast as two cultural fields. Kneading on all sides, exposing the words, getting hairy by giving birth to the hybrid, bridling the forms but unbridling the background, it is the artwork that undoes the meaning and "it is the viewer who makes the painting".

Thus, lulling and fooling us at the same time with plural allusions, including the erotic, and with singular illusions, including the poetic, Mayura Torii’s works dare to cut the raw word and the (recognized) visible to plant a hiatus there that says as much as a haiku...

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