Yutaka Watanabe
10 - 31 Oct 2009
YUTAKA WATANABE
Yutaka Watanabe paints scenes of peculiar structures, mixtures of the artificial and the natural. Watanabe states, "I grew up in Tokyo surrounded by manmade things, accepting the world I saw in front of me on TV as reality, preferring artificially colored food to natural food, and fascinated by supernatural phenomena, ghosts, monsters, unexplained occurrences, and the riddles of the ancients. Within the ordered life Ied growing up, I feasted my eyes on an overflowing chaos of color and information, and this past has become the foundation of my painting." (Excerpted from the Fuchu Biennial catalog.)
In the Ark series (referring to both the boat and the place of refuge), previously shown at the Tomio Koyama Gallery, a void appears as if the wall of one building in the middle of a residential district suddenly collapsed; it is painted such that a mysterious composition arises, one in which the boundary between indoors and outdoors is blurred. Works that seem to repeat a wordless conversation, in which rectangular, bent plants and furniture commingle against the backdrop of a stage set house next door, are reminiscent of Futurist and Surrealist painting. After this, in the OO-PARTS(Out of Place Artifacts)series shown in the 2008 Fuchu Biennial, a more audacious motif is reconstructed: the more the depicted elements are weeded out, the structural relationship between the foremost structure and the background is brought to attention.
The more we peer at the complicated, inscrutable scene Watanabe paints, combining unique colors far removed from the descriptive colors, we feel dejavu, confused by the branch-like thing dancing in the image, or the house-like thing lingering in the background.
Yutaka Watanabe paints scenes of peculiar structures, mixtures of the artificial and the natural. Watanabe states, "I grew up in Tokyo surrounded by manmade things, accepting the world I saw in front of me on TV as reality, preferring artificially colored food to natural food, and fascinated by supernatural phenomena, ghosts, monsters, unexplained occurrences, and the riddles of the ancients. Within the ordered life Ied growing up, I feasted my eyes on an overflowing chaos of color and information, and this past has become the foundation of my painting." (Excerpted from the Fuchu Biennial catalog.)
In the Ark series (referring to both the boat and the place of refuge), previously shown at the Tomio Koyama Gallery, a void appears as if the wall of one building in the middle of a residential district suddenly collapsed; it is painted such that a mysterious composition arises, one in which the boundary between indoors and outdoors is blurred. Works that seem to repeat a wordless conversation, in which rectangular, bent plants and furniture commingle against the backdrop of a stage set house next door, are reminiscent of Futurist and Surrealist painting. After this, in the OO-PARTS(Out of Place Artifacts)series shown in the 2008 Fuchu Biennial, a more audacious motif is reconstructed: the more the depicted elements are weeded out, the structural relationship between the foremost structure and the background is brought to attention.
The more we peer at the complicated, inscrutable scene Watanabe paints, combining unique colors far removed from the descriptive colors, we feel dejavu, confused by the branch-like thing dancing in the image, or the house-like thing lingering in the background.