Polymerization #12

The structure I pursue in painting is one in which ground and figure interpenetrate within the pictorial field. No single part is fixed as the foremost plane; instead, multiple possibilities remain in a state of fluctuation as they settle into the image. This sense of instability resembles the way vision operates: when we look at something with the naked eye, our gaze shifts across the field, focus constantly adjusting, and the image in the brain is never fully stable.

I consider this interpenetration of ground and figure to be one of the most crucial elements of modern painting since Cézanne and Cubism. Yet in Japanese art (and art education), this element does not seem to have been fully assimilated. Tracing the work of preceding domestic artists, there appear to be surprisingly few cases in which this structure has been successfully internalized.

Since 2022, my work has focused on how to incorporate the instability of binocular vision into painting. In retrospect, this became an attempt to install the interpenetrating structure that emerged from Cézanne through early Cubism. I only realized this afterward.

Perhaps this was a reinvention of the wheel of modern painting. At the time, I did not think so. Precisely because of that, however, I may have developed a method of interpenetrating ground and figure that is subtly misaligned with those of modern painters working in real time.

Living in the present, I use computers to simulate the structure of an image repeatedly. In my process, I prepare multiple images—some drawn directly on the surface, others on separate supports—scan them, and composite them in Photoshop as if weaving them together. I then paint the resulting image, partially tracing the very process of its compositing. The method of combining these images differs greatly from work to work and is too complex to fully describe, but intuitively, it feels like a compression of forward-moving time and reversed time (control + Z), layered intricately and manifesting on the surface of the painting.

As I weave multiple images together, I do so by simultaneously breaking them apart. This gives me the sensation of producing something inherently unfinishable, a broken state that resists completion. So where does the work reach its finish? It is when the multiple source images achieve a state of maximum tension in which their possible coexistence on a single plane is most balanced. In other words, the state in which possibilities are still in flux approximates the unstable image perceived by the eye and mind that I initially sought.

This may seem like a digression, but have you seen the film TENET? It features an opposing force that moves backward through time, and agents who fight them along the forward flow of time. In the film, there is a concept called the “inverted bullet”: a projectile that already exists embedded in its target and returns to the gun when summoned. The film never explains when such a bullet first came to be there. While I do not fully understand the film myself, there is something in it that resonates with my recent work.

In the process of simulating and compositing images on a computer—manipulating both forward and reverse temporal directions—the resulting image begins to feel as though it was not entirely made by me. It is as if it were transmitted from another timeline, from a future version of myself. Like an inverted bullet that had always already been embedded in the wall. Where does this painting come from? Of course, I painted it. Yet the image I seek feels as though it has always existed, arriving from the future, where multiple temporal possibilities emerge and fluctuate. Still, unless I begin to paint, that future will not transmit the image to me. I must leap toward the timeline in which it exists.

Framing Information

The listed price includes a temporary frame.

The price without a frame is JPY 99,000 (tax included).