Traces", by Yukihisa Isobe and Tetsuo Mizù at Whitestone Gallery

For the first time placed in direct dialogue, the works of Yukihisa Isobe and the late Tetsuo Mizù (1944-2025) meet in "Traces", a group exhibition at Whitestone Gallery that gains special resonance after Mizù's death in January 2025. The exhibition brings together six decades of production by the two Japanese artists around the same impulse: the desire to record what is at risk of disappearing. Isobe, a central figure of the post-war Japanese avant-garde, became known for the "Wappen" series (1961-65), heraldic symbols repeated in stone powder and relief fresco textures, before spending two decades as an ecological planner and returning to art through monumental land art installations that make invisible environmental histories visible. Mizù, celebrated in Europe and Asia for his luminous paintings derived from international maritime signaling flags, encoded personal memory and longing within geometric abstraction. Although one works in an almost forensic manner and the other lyrically, both have dedicated their careers to the gesture of tracing—inscribing presence where absence threatens to take hold. The exhibition takes as its starting point a quote from Walter Benjamin in "Passages", according to which the trace is the appearance of a proximity, however distant that which left it behind may be.