Shigeko Hirakawa's text, published in
the catalogue "Recent Works"

Ellipse

I tell myself sometimes that I am following a road which has already been taken several times before, and am surprised by this discovery, sure as I was a few moments earlier of a path leading straight ahead. No doubt it is a kind of happy awakening. The real step forward would be to stop short once aware of the illusion. To continue on may way in the same direction, believing l am making progress, can certainly only lead to an irremediable regression. In any case, such an awakening forces me to make a choice.

Sometimes I find myself faced with a radical dilemma: keep everything, or give everything up. Our experience, past or to came, is imprisoned in an irreversible temporal order. All of a sudden I have to make a perilous decision - it's as if I had to make my way along a thin cord without being a tight-rope walker. The feeling I still had, just before the need to choose became apparent, now turns out to be illusory. Faced with the gap which suddenly opens up between the image I had of reality and the reality revealed to me on waking, my consciousness is transformed. It tries to assimilate the reality just revealed with the image it has of the world, and to invest it with an enormous amount of energy in order to enlarge it. May this energy guide me on my walk along the tight-rope, may it let me catch a glimpse of a new world beyond all already-known dimensions... that is my most profound desire.

Artists have long evoked the image of the Universe and the Earth tram different perspectives. Often I imagine myself observing the Earth from a very distant vantage point, at the other end of the universe, and I wonder then what form the earth would take if one compressed it to the point of flattening it completely (1). Reduced to a flat surface, the result, in my imagination, would be an ellipse rather than a perfect circle. Its two poles, the Arctic and the Antarctic, would be flattened into a two-dimensional surface. However, refusing to be superposed and to unite in a single median point, they would alter the forming circle, making it an ellipse of which they would be the focal points. These two foci make me think of Yin and Yang. I imagine a gigantic spiral stretched between the two opposing poles, inhaling and exhaling the magnetic force of the Earth. I also try to transpose it into a temporal dimension: it would then become a spiral traversing lime from the pole of the past toward that of the future. Man would be a minute electron circulating in its magnetic field. It should perhaps be said that my vision of the ellipse is inspired less by the flattening of the earth than by that of the magnetic field in its spiral form: if crushed by a lateral force, what would result would again be an ellipse.

We can note that the word ellipse comes, by way of the Latin ellipsis, from the Greek elleipsis, which etymologically signifies lack (2). Apart from the geometrical figure, it refers to the omission of one or more words which are insinuated, the interlocutor knowing tacitly how to provide them spontaneously. What this practice implies (tacit or prior agreement, shared supposition and innuendo) can turn out to be absolutely incomprehensible to any third party not in a position to have access to it. For him, in other words, the presence of an ellipse can render the meaning of what is heard completely opaque. And effectively, the world is made up, essentially, of people who rub shoulders whilst turning their backs on each other. At any given moment we run the risk of finding ourselves prisoners in our little, closed worlds. Yet we need to force ourselves to hold a hand out to another world, to the world of the other. Only then will we be able to see our perspectives break free, only then will we attain a point of view allowing us to embrace the totality of other worlds from the firmament, and discover, amongst the multitude of ellipses disseminated across the Universe, the Ellipse par excellence. The image of the ellipse, at once a geometrical figure with a double focal point - Yin and Yang - and an art of communication presupposing a closed space of verbal exchange, is nothing less than a metaphor of Man. Man himself has two points of focus: good and evil. At first sight they may look like two mutually exclusive surfaces - and yet they are interchangeable depending on the position one is in. In this respect, they appear less like two diametrically opposed poles than juxtaposed points, two foci cohabiting on a single plane. The Ellipse that I bring into being in the middle of a canvas when it is bleached represents, as if by an empty imprint, Man caught in his impetus at the very moment when, with all his might, he throws himself into passing through time. My work aims to restore, if only for a single instant, the manner in which the successive layers of time cover the original state of human existence, as do the successive layers of earth over the ruins of an ancient civilisation. The bleach has the task of driving away the scoriae of time. To be sure, I don't deny that the use of decoloring agents may have dangerous effects - which indicates the intervention of a certain violence. But this violence is there, I hope, so that the Ellipse can awaken us even more surely, bringing us back to the origins of Life.

(1) "There are several spots in the form of globes flattened at the poles. They seem to revolve on a complex orbit in the greenery. You would like to come closer, but going near one makes the others retreat. You feel transported to a discovery of the sumptuousness of the Universe. " From the artist's text in the catalogue published for the urban sculpture competition held in the honour of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska at St-Jean-de-Braye, France, 1992 (Concours / Sculpteurs dans la Ville: Hommage à Henri Gaudier-Brzeska).

(2) Petit Robert French Dictionary: "Ellipse- syntactic or stylistic omission of one or more words which the mind provides more or less spontaneously (...) Art of summary or innuendo. 'There is no question of him telling everything, he knows much more than he says. It is simply that language is ellipse.' (Sartre)(...) Metaphor of 'lack'"

Shigeko Hirakawa's text, published in
the catalogue "Recent Works"

Ellipse

I tell myself sometimes that I am following a road which has already been taken several times before, and am surprised by this discovery, sure as I was a few moments earlier of a path leading straight ahead. No doubt it is a kind of happy awakening. The real step forward would be to stop short once aware of the illusion. To continue on may way in the same direction, believing l am making progress, can certainly only lead to an irremediable regression. In any case, such an awakening forces me to make a choice.

Sometimes I find myself faced with a radical dilemma: keep everything, or give everything up. Our experience, past or to came, is imprisoned in an irreversible temporal order. All of a sudden I have to make a perilous decision - it's as if I had to make my way along a thin cord without being a tight-rope walker. The feeling I still had, just before the need to choose became apparent, now turns out to be illusory. Faced with the gap which suddenly opens up between the image I had of reality and the reality revealed to me on waking, my consciousness is transformed. It tries to assimilate the reality just revealed with the image it has of the world, and to invest it with an enormous amount of energy in order to enlarge it. May this energy guide me on my walk along the tight-rope, may it let me catch a glimpse of a new world beyond all already-known dimensions... that is my most profound desire.

Artists have long evoked the image of the Universe and the Earth tram different perspectives. Often I imagine myself observing the Earth from a very distant vantage point, at the other end of the universe, and I wonder then what form the earth would take if one compressed it to the point of flattening it completely (1). Reduced to a flat surface, the result, in my imagination, would be an ellipse rather than a perfect circle. Its two poles, the Arctic and the Antarctic, would be flattened into a two-dimensional surface. However, refusing to be superposed and to unite in a single median point, they would alter the forming circle, making it an ellipse of which they would be the focal points. These two foci make me think of Yin and Yang. I imagine a gigantic spiral stretched between the two opposing poles, inhaling and exhaling the magnetic force of the Earth. I also try to transpose it into a temporal dimension: it would then become a spiral traversing lime from the pole of the past toward that of the future. Man would be a minute electron circulating in its magnetic field. It should perhaps be said that my vision of the ellipse is inspired less by the flattening of the earth than by that of the magnetic field in its spiral form: if crushed by a lateral force, what would result would again be an ellipse.

We can note that the word ellipse comes, by way of the Latin ellipsis, from the Greek elleipsis, which etymologically signifies lack (2). Apart from the geometrical figure, it refers to the omission of one or more words which are insinuated, the interlocutor knowing tacitly how to provide them spontaneously. What this practice implies (tacit or prior agreement, shared supposition and innuendo) can turn out to be absolutely incomprehensible to any third party not in a position to have access to it. For him, in other words, the presence of an ellipse can render the meaning of what is heard completely opaque. And effectively, the world is made up, essentially, of people who rub shoulders whilst turning their backs on each other. At any given moment we run the risk of finding ourselves prisoners in our little, closed worlds. Yet we need to force ourselves to hold a hand out to another world, to the world of the other. Only then will we be able to see our perspectives break free, only then will we attain a point of view allowing us to embrace the totality of other worlds from the firmament, and discover, amongst the multitude of ellipses disseminated across the Universe, the Ellipse par excellence. The image of the ellipse, at once a geometrical figure with a double focal point - Yin and Yang - and an art of communication presupposing a closed space of verbal exchange, is nothing less than a metaphor of Man. Man himself has two points of focus: good and evil. At first sight they may look like two mutually exclusive surfaces - and yet they are interchangeable depending on the position one is in. In this respect, they appear less like two diametrically opposed poles than juxtaposed points, two foci cohabiting on a single plane. The Ellipse that I bring into being in the middle of a canvas when it is bleached represents, as if by an empty imprint, Man caught in his impetus at the very moment when, with all his might, he throws himself into passing through time. My work aims to restore, if only for a single instant, the manner in which the successive layers of time cover the original state of human existence, as do the successive layers of earth over the ruins of an ancient civilisation. The bleach has the task of driving away the scoriae of time. To be sure, I don't deny that the use of decoloring agents may have dangerous effects - which indicates the intervention of a certain violence. But this violence is there, I hope, so that the Ellipse can awaken us even more surely, bringing us back to the origins of Life.

(1) "There are several spots in the form of globes flattened at the poles. They seem to revolve on a complex orbit in the greenery. You would like to come closer, but going near one makes the others retreat. You feel transported to a discovery of the sumptuousness of the Universe. " From the artist's text in the catalogue published for the urban sculpture competition held in the honour of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska at St-Jean-de-Braye, France, 1992 (Concours / Sculpteurs dans la Ville: Hommage à Henri Gaudier-Brzeska).

(2) Petit Robert French Dictionary: "Ellipse- syntactic or stylistic omission of one or more words which the mind provides more or less spontaneously (...) Art of summary or innuendo. 'There is no question of him telling everything, he knows much more than he says. It is simply that language is ellipse.' (Sartre)(...) Metaphor of 'lack'"