Specific Surface

There are some places I've never been.

While never having truly traveled to the modernist destination, such a well-known western site, with it's not particularly hard to pick--clues, here and there, understandings--of this and that. It's not hard to fool.

'Eloquence' is a symptom of hard times.

Certainly, almost anyone, especially a painter of oral pictures can just go out once on an imaginary vacation and come back born and raised a native speaker.

It is also true that destinations of sorts fall out of favor, become ill fated somewhere along the trip--and conversation, which had turned heads, turns them differently--this time away.

Natsumi Kawashiro and Yuairi Iwatani come together for a show entitled Specific Surface--and obviously the issues present are something to do with painting--a certain historically defined kind, that wish to be relocated as something else. More the pity!

A popular phrase, perhaps an undisclosed title for the exhibition is 'Near Monochrome', which can come to mean anything, thus nothing, yet with the language available does identify the work on the wall.

An introduction written by Jiro Nagakusa suggests the paintings should not be read with the modernist key. That the modernist surface represents an illness, one bent on the destructive, always scratched or gashed into, with the ulterior motive to producing something new.

It's a strange singular reading yet there are moments.

The paintings themselves are both inward and outward files. Natsumi Kawashiro blows reds with harder to make out blobs darker under the skin and remind me of microscopic impressions of the flow of blood and shadows in the vein.

Different veins make the flow of light in Yuairi Iwatani, with tiny disruptions (scratches) in surface paint on ply--scratches that are OK in Nagakusa's mind.

Together, these are concentrated works hardly about statements--yet color states a position. Up front and clear initially dissolving finer tunings and marks.

Internally each group of painting has their own speed, rhythm and internal scale. There is a balanced difference in the way each artist arrives at a painting's sensuality. Kawashiro's reds are not hot, nor cold, but do throb. The colorful, lighter than candy of Iwatani dance closest to the surface despite the scratching, which form webs hard to distinguish at a distance whether they lay behind or stretch each way over surface.

(Yet with soliloquy I am left to wonder.)

Jiro Nagakusa continues the crusade against the modernist and uses a model of 'the geographic', and insists with this there is always something to look at--a something real to keep us entertained. This look of the real, for Nagakusa, is a world of absences and reductions--and sounds a nasty one, and would keep painting in a state of the catastrophic. The breaking of the surface, he says, informs both the look and its violence drawing the viewer into a sickness. From this the modernist viewer is traumatized to the extreme as they are subjected to mutilated 'cut and exploding surfaces'.

(Wow it sounds like torture--should I go on?)

Meaning for him does not lay in the battle of surface, or in a "violent insistence", as he puts it, but exists somewhere between a window and the graphic, and that this strange non-physical place is the arguer for the real--the lexicon, the motif, and the painting.

We come to understand, too, how the title of the exhibition came about. In 1965 Donald Judd introduced the term 'Specific Object', and the title of this exhibition substitutes Object with Surface, bringing home that it is painting that we are looking and talking about. There is a danger of course of interpreting this switch to mean painting is absent of its object--or nonsensically, that painting is objectless, or, one-sided. But we get it--this show is primarily about the surface of painting and not the edges, the back, or other practical evidence.

Nana Itani's monotypes are another expression of paint on surface--paint this time filtered through the silkscreen.

Itani mentions in her forward translated and abbreviated here:

Looking out through Drops on the glass of the window on a Spring morning transforms them into a kaleidoscope. There are colors of pink and light green outside. To catch these is not to capture the object, but the color itself - color and light not of the extraordinary but of ordinary life outside the window experienced each day.

The work looks anything but ordinary.

The extraordinary for Itani is transferring one experience to another--and while this is impossible to do exactly, as each experience is its own, recognition lay somewhat at midway point, internalizing, both words are Nana Itani's, resolved to--this is what it is!. It might be a call, in semblence, to an already held experience, or may be an entirely different one --something new, or, something to be caught and let go of later on.

Here on the wall, color shimmers between actuality, and as Itani expresses rightly --you get it right there.

I tussle, and front, thinking sometimes it good to keep things simple--taken by the three.