One could ponder at length what role art truly plays in the face of a disaster that swept everything away in a single instant. The 2011 tsunami along Japan‘s eastern coast meant, for visual artist Aono Fumiaki (Sendai, 1968) and for many of his compatriots, the loss of everyday life. And before that, the torment and disorientation of witnessing a terrible spectacle of nature, one that devoured «every form of home» once loved and familiar.

At dawn the following day, the helpless remains of that monstrous passage occupied Fumiaki’s mind and hands, and from the debris he chose to build new possible paths to salvation. Imagining a livable, tellable tomorrow, every fragment of shattered life became material for a composition charged with hope and «everything new to be thought and rebuilt».

Gathered within the folds of forgetting and tragedy, the artist’s practice has, over the years, accumulated material stories to be rendered in a new and surprising design form. Assemblages with anthropomorphic shapes and works on paper, made in the aesthetic most typical of minimalism and conceptual art, occupy the space of a thought that has never stopped dreaming of a new horizon.

Within the capitalist logic of consumption and markets, Aono Fumiaki’s work travels the most layered paths of a possible, living, achievable difference. In the name of a craftsman’s essence, and in the particularity of pieces that are worn yet unique, the artist builds his most personal idea of routes and visions on art. Placing himself within a rich tradition that has turned the symbolism of materials into a tool for denouncing the logic of superficial, endless consumption, Fumiaki celebrates the value of the small gesture within the flow of life, returning the nostalgic emotion of humanly lived, minute gestures.

Starting from the long Untitled series, which explored paper and a refined graphic experimentation tied to the matter of waste (magazine clippings, typographic cutouts, colored cardboard), his environmental installations pushed toward the more creative rendering of everyday fragments, inhabited by a new vital spirit. Old chests of drawers, the remains of chairs and tables, led him to imagine, as in a contemporary fairy tale, the movements and different forms of a dynamic, free urban reality.

Halfway between the imaginative universe of silhouettes (evoked in urban planning by John Hejduk) and a theatre of everyday outlines restored to the “new world,” Aono Fumiaki’s work has steered its creative path toward an idea of dreamlike, and in its own way contrarian, repair.