Stacking Boxes' first work.
Like an ancient ritual vessel,
Fantasy city model.

The "Overlapping Boxes" series is one of Aya Koizumi's representative sculptural works. In the early days, the artist created "boxes" that contained miniature structures such as stairs and pillars, but through a process of trial and error, he discovered the idea of "nesting boxes" as he transformed the energy generated by the fact that they are "boxes" into a pure "shape." Although the boxes are "nested," this is not a centripetal nesting structure in which boxes are stacked in order, like a tsuzura basket or a matryoshka doll, but rather a unique method in which boxes are shifted centripetally. We will introduce the "overlapping boxes" series of works born from this idea of "nesting."

This work, the first in the "Overlapping Boxes" series, which currently has 11 pieces, has a tranquil presence like white porcelain with a base. Although the pieces are not glued together, they overlap each other and rise up from the ground.

According to Koizumi, the rule is to start with placing one square box in the center. After that, like the Diablocks we used to play with as children, the idea is to create a structure by stacking boxes one on top of another, making "notches" so that the next box can overlap, and stacking boxes of various shapes centrifugally.

After going through this process, the "Stacked Boxes" are finally painted with acrylic gesso and guaju and the surface is sanded down, giving them a mysterious presence that makes them look like antiques from a thousand years ago, or something from a thousand years in the future. The more you look at them, the more mysterious they become, and they seem to resemble ritual vessels from an ancient dynasty, a block of typefaces, or even a flying saucer.

Italo Calvino's model of an imaginary city in "Invisible Cities"The experience of letting your imagination flow freely in each of the various spaces that are created through partitioning may be exactly the same as the feeling of an archaeologist tracing the artist's thoughts as they are.


Text by Kenya Nakazawa (FRAGILE BOOKS)

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