LEBLON DELIENNE

Kokeshi

Kokeshi are wooden lacquered dolls from japanese culture. Traditionally handcrafted for children or given as gifts, they were thought to bring good health and the promise of a fulfilling life.
For his first collaboration with Leblon Delienne, José Levy playfully reinterprets these objects, traditionally imbued with magical qualities and symbolism – and reimagines them in a fun-loving way. The artisanal figurines were not only popular toys but were also regarded as precious objects – their simplified silhouettes became avatars of various sentiments and feeling. Levy’s interest in these objects plays on the meeting point between being both historical traditional object with magical symbolism as well as an object of popular culture.
Levy’s figurines are characterised by two fundamental design concepts. Firstly abstraction – unlike their historical counterparts, Levy’s dolls are entirely black and devoid of colour which was traditionally used to animate them. The figurines are no longer characterised by their hand-painted decorative forms, but rather the
varying textures of the lacquer, with the additional application of leather, bamboo fibres and burned wood. As the light moves across their uniform black surfaces the irregularities are subtly highlighted to give the objects a quality of movement and life. The second concept is the change of scale. Traditionally the figurines are miniature models of the human figure. Here, Levy’s object of reference is no longer the human body but rather the doll itself, and the scaling process is an enlargement rather than a reduction. These large, dark Kokeshi figures exceed human
proportions and in turn give a new magnitude to the techniques involved in the production process. The meticulous details are now amplified and subject to scrutiny. The abstraction of the carved cuts to evoke the fold of a garment, the sketched eyes, or the movement of the hair, go beyond their figurative attributes.