Unruly Mobility // 2023
Exhibition part of the artists residency Kumanonisumu! in Kamikawa, Japan

Tinatin Natsvlishvili:

The works of Matthias Ramsey are placed on the threshold between naturalistic depiction of living beings and surrealistic allusions to critically political and deeply personal themes. His multilayered paintings serve as a showcase for the encounter of all these topics illustrated with high fidelity to detail.

The starting point for the painting series made during the KUMANONISUMU Project in Kamikawa is the story of the Bavarian scientist Phillip Franz von Siebold. He was a doctor working at the trading port of Dejima during the Sakoku period. At the time foreign travel and trade in Japan was restricted to this tiny artificial island in the harbor of Nagasaki. Siebold used the friendly relations to his Japanese patients to get special permission to travel on the mainland and collect specimens for an extensive zoological and botanical collection. These became the foundation for all western Japanological studies. In recent years this collection also caused some major headaches for European ecologists and conservationists. As they had introduced a number of highly invasive species that are now changing central European ecosystems. Siebold’s story illustrates several aspects of the „unruly mobility “- a term, which describes uncontrollable forms of mobility that challenge societies in unexpected and often unwanted ways. Many species of plants and animals that are now considered native to Japan often migrated accidentally through this sort of circumstances.

In reference to the scientific reexploring, Ramsey's paintings describe a world that has changed dramatically over the past two centuries, while taking up the forms of arrangement that are a subtle correspondence to the drawings of Kawahara Keiga - a Japanese painter who drew and colored detailed images of Japanese nature on behalf of Phillip Franz von Siebold.  In his work historical facts, mythological allusions and naturalistic depictions of the local flora and fauna flow into each other, intersect and sometimes challenge one another in a variety of complex surrealistic displays.gs serve as a showcase for the encounter of all these topics illustrated with high fidelity to detai
In reference to the scientific reexploring, Ramsey's paintings describe a world that has changed dramatically over the past two centuries, while taking up the forms of arrangement that are a subtle correspondence to the drawings of Kawahara Keiga - a Japanese painter who drew and colored detailed images of Japanese nature on behalf of Phillip Franz von Siebold.  In his work historical facts, mythological allusions and naturalistic depictions of the local flora and fauna flow into each other, intersect and sometimes challenge one another in a variety of complex surrealistic displays.

all photography by Tinatin Natsvlishvili and Kriztina Kerekesh