Fleur de lis (arc)

Royal Touch, Ayano’s installation at Oshiire, takes as its point of departure an ancient belief according to which the monarchs of France and England were thought to heal the sick through touch. Drawing on two found slides—one depicting a Meissen porcelain miniature of Louis XV, the first French king to abandon this ritual, the other a faience fountain and basin associated with acts of purification—Ayano composes a work that brings into tension power, belief, and modes of representation. The two images are set at the rear of a wooden structure composed of successively receding planes, evoking at once optical devices and nineteenth-century paper theatres, Robert Smithson’s sculptural investigations of perspective, and certain architectural stagings at Versailles.

The fleur-de-lis motif—a stylized iris that became a royal emblem—frames the installation within the Oshiire space and extends into the edition Fleur de lis (arc), which offers a condensed iteration of the work. Through this dispositif, Ayano brings together two key dimensions of his practice: a fascination with furniture and a sustained reflection on how objects and gestures, once detached from their original context, persist as floating images. In doing so, he continues a form of visual archaeology, attentive both to the images themselves and to the conditions of their appearance.