VIA

2004

waterfall, stainless steel mirror, stone

700 × 450 cm, hillside 300 m
Livigno, Italy
Photo : Enza Tamborra

 

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In 2004, he produced a programmatic work, VIA, in a valley near Livigno in Italy. Reijro Wada carefully modified an Italian waterfall, and combined two water streams into one. He retraced the original bed of the torrent which had disappeared, and set in place a mirror following the line of a natural fault, expressing the ambiguous and paradoxical relationship of man in the face of nature, between fascination, admiration and destruction. The landscape is subtly altered as a result, yet not transformed as it was by Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, a huge jetty of stones sunk into the Great Salt Lake in Utah, USA. Reijiro Wada prefers to preserve the contours of the landscape and renew its links with its geological past. He explains that he sees a new landscape take shape before a concept, choice of materials or title emerge. His initial vision crystallises in his mind while the discourse of the work and the elements in its creation come together as he goes along. In his constructions, he develops abstract compositions, forms which do not exist in nature. His intervention as an artist is often limited to this impromptu insertion into our environment, bringing a Cartesian sequence where none normally exists. Thus abstraction becomes the only trace of the human being in space.

 

Loïc Le Gal, Assistant Curator of Centre Pompidou

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