melt-Through

This solo exhibition by Takeshi Hosaka is a continuation of last year’s show, Art in the Mundane : Being in Everyday, hence the title Art in the Mundane : Being in Everyday 2. As in his previous works, the paintings present spatial structures and color fields that are both simple and intricately composed upon the canvas. Each surface is evenly painted to eliminate painterly sentiment, achieving a balance and rhythm that define Hosaka’s visual language. Born in Fukushima, Hosaka often titles his works “ debris ”, invoking the lingering memory of radiation and its history of use in Japan―an essential conceptual layer in his art. A distinctive feature of this new exhibition is the diversity of canvas sizes. It may seem a minor detail, yet for an artist who has long worked with three-dimensional, object-like forms, the flat, frontal surface of a canvas once posed a certain discomfort. For that reason, his earlier works on large canvases began as an attempt to confront a format in which he himself felt little material presence. Now, in this second series, it seems Hosaka’s sensibility and perception have finally harmonized with the nature of the canvas. Viewers can expect works in a wide range of sizes, each revealing the rhythmic interplay of Hosaka’s distinctive color palette―whether on an intimate or grand scale.

As I was viewing the new pieces, especially the square-format works, an image of a garden suddenly came to mind. Not a lush garden filled with trees and flowers, but the famous dry landscape garden at Ryōan-ji―composed of white gravel and stones.
The perspective I imagined was not of the entire garden, but of a fragment: a single stone arrangement, or perhaps a small tsuboniwa courtyard. Hosaka’s slightly off-white, cream-toned backgrounds seem to function as white sand or spatial voids, generating within real space a pictorial fiction―a “place” that is simultaneously painted and imagined. Upon these grounds, the color planes appear, upon closer inspection, not as mere two-dimensional surfaces but as possessing subtle three-dimensional volume. In that sense, they function much like the stone compositions of karesansui (dry gardens). If the monochrome austerity of a Zen garden at Ryōan-ji serves to prompt meditation and contemplation, then Hosaka’s “ debris ” paintings―through their harmonious colors and stable compositions―seem to invite relaxation, release, and, in turn, imaginative reflection. Speaking of which, David Hockney once created a photographic work capturing Ryōan-ji’s garden. His multi-perspective, reverse-perspective composition was deeply thoughtful yet full of playfulness―very much in Hockney’s spirit. I imagine Hosaka, too, was aware of such ideas as he conceived this new series.
Please enjoy these colorful, spirited works that expand both vision and thought.