The Animal We Carry

Bremond Capela is pleased to present “The Animal We Carry,” Kai Yoda’s first solo exhibition in France.

The exhibition marks an important moment in Kai Yoda’s trajectory. After ten years of working within the duo Ittah Yoda, this solo presentation opens a new chapter. The duo’s practice explored complex ecosystems and forms of interconnection between living systems, technology, and the environment. Here, Kai Yoda shifts his gaze toward a more interior dimension. The exhibition explores an
intimate zone, where desires, instincts, and sensations emerge before we are even able to name them.

Kai Yoda’s work arises from a dialogue between several ways of producing images. His oil paintings on linen are not fixed images. Rather, they appear as surfaces in transformation. Built up in layers, they move between traditional painting and contemporary tools, including artificial intelligence. The artist uses AI to bring forth unexpected colors, patterns, or images. Yet his work deliberately distances itself from an overly smooth digital aesthetic. Instead, he seeks to reveal traces of accident, fragility, imperfection, and matter. The figure is never entirely stable. It seems to appear, disappear, and then reform. Each painting gives visible form to a presence that is more difficult to grasp: a tension, an energy, a sensation made physical through painting.

The experience of the exhibition extends beyond the space of the canvas. Kai Yoda uses materials such as leather, beeswax, wood, and brass, notably in the works “Samuel” and “Daniel.” The leather elements are developed in collaboration with designer Marie-Ève Lecavalier, and exist between garment, sculpture, and painting. These materials create a more physical relationship to the works. They appeal to touch, smell, and the body’s memory. They also carry a material history. The leather comes from existing stocks. The pigments are largely made by hand from natural pigments, beeswax, and linseed oil. Some canvases are reused and repainted. The wood is dead wood collected in Vassivière, where the artist previously presented his work.

This attention to materials extends a broader ecological reflection. Kai Yoda seeks, as much as possible, to produce close to the exhibition site. He works with local materials, artisans, and collaborators connected to the context of the project. Ecology does not therefore appear here as an illustrated subject. It becomes a way of thinking about the relationships between human, animal, nature, and technology. In a world where images and forms can be generated with increasing ease, the exhibition returns to what remains deeply human: intimacy, pain, pleasure, contact, imperfection, and the memory of the body.

This desire to involve the visitor continues during the opening, and at several moments throughout the exhibition, through a tasting ritual conceived by the artist. With the participation of chef Megumi Takeyama, small bites are offered to visitors as an extension of the exhibition itself. This is not a performance in the classical sense. Rather, it is a ritualized moment in which eating becomes a way of bringing the work into oneself through taste and smell. Leather pieces, developed in collaboration with Marie-Ève Lecavalier, extend this experience into a more embodied form, existing between garment, sculpture, and painting. The visitor then becomes one of the triggers of the installation. The exhibition leaves behind the usual distance of looking and becomes a process of sharing and incorporation.

The works are organized around a gallery of presences identified by first names: “Adam,” “Augustine,” “Viktor.” These names do not refer to specific portraits. Rather, they designate mental, physical, or emotional figures. The bodies are often fragmented or in a state of dissolution. They evoke a tension of the flesh that might be associated with Francis Bacon. Yet here, this tension unfolds within a more silent and restrained atmosphere, close to the pared-down clarity of Isamu Noguchi.

Within the space of Galerie Bremond Capela, the display gives an important place to emptiness, distance, and shifts in scale. The passage between small formats and larger works requires the viewer to adjust their position. It alters their rhythm, proximity, and relationship to the works. The exhibition functions like a living organism. Each element, from the detail of a painting to the tasting ritual, forms an active component. The paintings may also be read as marks, sketches, or fragments of a journal. They concentrate a strong emotional charge while opening toward future installations.

Rather than telling a story, Kai Yoda creates an environment of coexistence. The natural and the fabricated, the constructed and the instinctive, the living and the artificial ultimately come together. The exhibition makes visible a fragile zone of contact, where the human and the animal, the gaze and sensation, begin to merge.

Kai Yoda (born in 1985 in Tokyo) lives and works between Paris, London, Tokyo, and Stockholm. Trained at Keio University in Tokyo and the Royal College of Art in London, he co-founded the duo Ittah Yoda in 2015 before initiating his solo practice in 2024. His work has been presented in institutions including the Palais de Tokyo, the CIAP on Vassivière Island, and Château La Coste. His works are held in the collections of the FRAC Pays de la Loire, the FRAC Artothèque Nouvelle-Aquitaine, and the Sigg Art Foundation.

Collaborations:
The exhibition was developed with the contribution of Megumi Takeyama, chef; CVNSUMED, sound; and David Chieze, scent. All works involving leather were developed in collaboration with Marie-Ève Lecavalier.