KENJI IDE

Ide roots his practice both in memory and in interaction with his surroundings, translating intangible experiences relating to time, atmosphere, and human relationships into delicate material forms. In his studio, the works emerge through a tentative, almost collage-like process between the built and the found, wood and stone. Installed in the Germantown gallery, the exhibition’s works dialogue with its domestic architecture, each sculpture human, personal, and somewhat fragmented in scale and scope, appearing as objects scattered through the room as much as gathered into any one piece. The plinths are cut to thirty centimeters, a traditional table height in Japan, Ide wanting the sculptures perceived as though they had been placed inside someone’s house, set at the height where a hand might naturally approach them. Floating hands and other isolated parts of the body recur across the group, complements to this tactile, lived layer of domestic life.

A house can hold whole worlds, and together these sculptures express one such world: a mindscape marked by isolation, quiet strangeness, the kind of place a person reaches only in dreams. Ide’s work recalls the enclosed, filmic worlds of Joseph Cornell, beautiful in their solitude and secrecy. Loneliness and more specifically “distance” are prevailing themes running through the work, with Ide sculpting forms that figure distance to oneself, distance to others, distance to humanity. He composes a world without humans where his sculptures keep a strange existence of their own, holding to an independent life across spans of time beyond human presence. Seen in the distance (2026) states the artist’s aims directly, its human-like figures and spare columns spaced along a low platform, in a game of hide and seek in which each form keeps its distance. The pilotis themselves perform what architecture has always done well, drawing bodies together as easily as holding them apart, the thin upright forms recalling the spaced, solitary figures of Surrealist sculpture such as Giacometti’s.

A house is where sleep occurs, where bodies lie at rest at night, where the objects of life surround a sleeping body. Georges Perec described this kind of withdrawal from the world through sleep in his 1967 novella A Man Asleep, whose narrator sinks into indifference until he learns “to look at men as if they were stones.” The sculptures ask to be seen the same way, as small made things set down here and there, present whether or not anyone is looking at them, depicting human life withdrawn. Lie on the border and dream (2026) lays a small figure between two standing panels, set against a die and a fragment of sandstone, caught adrift just before sleep, when the self loosens its hold, and the room carries on without it.

Ide proposes that the mind is a structure with distinct sides, front and back, visible and unseen, his sculptures picturing scenes where manmade things persist with no one present to perceive them. He speaks of their agency, their presence as bodies acting with no human intentions behind them. In Game of causality (2026), a small floating hand poised over a shallow well is an object of exquisite loneliness, the loneliness of a plaything left behind after the play has stopped. Ide describes his works as miniatures; a miniature has the ability to accentuate a fragment, to isolate a single object or detail. Wax and wane (2026), a dark disk set behind a block of wood and half out of sight, places the seen and the unseen side by side. “If my practice has a shape, it is that of a mindscape,” Ide says, naming the inner half of that same project, the half that has no need for anyone to watch it. At night (2026) exemplifies two directions important to Ide’s aesthetic; a dark ground is set with thin upright forms, an empty labyrinth standing in for the mind, and at the same time a small piece of that outer world. Ide’s sculptures work in two directions at once this way: miniatures mapping a world, the shapes of things existing whether or not anyone notices them, and at the same time miniatures mapping a mind that does not need to be observed either, building inner worlds, mindscapes, dreams, the back of the mind, the possibility of “a world without human consciousness.”

For Ide, emptiness is expressed as texture, and the same distance that keeps figures from approaching one another becomes the loneliness of a thing left alone. A paradox sits at the center of this idea; a world without people would still be crowded with surfaces holding objects people once shaped, the loneliness coming from how much of us would remain. Consistent throughout Ide’s body of work, the narratives he gives to his sculptures engage the seen and unseen on the same surface.

Courtesy Mendes Wood DM.