Shinya Sakurai

May 21 - June 11, 2017

Hours ： 10:00 am ~ 6:30 pm
Tuesday (Open by appointment), Wednesday (closed)

Exhibiting work : New United colors series ‥‥abt. 20 pcs

■ Opening Tea Gathering
　“Within the Context of Contemporary Italian Art”　　Shinya Sakurai
　Date and Time: Sunday, May 21, 11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. 　Venue: ARTLAND Gallery 　Admission: Free
　Immediately after graduating from university, Sakurai decided to move to Italy. Since then, he has been based in Turin, Italy’s second-largest industrial city, and has pursued his career as an artist within the contemporary Italian art scene. 　Over a cup of tea, please join us for an engaging conversation with the artist on a wide range of fascinating topics, including the city of Turin, developments in contemporary art in Italy, and the circumstances surrounding galleries and artists’ studios. 　We look forward to welcoming you all.
■ After the Tea Gathering
The opening tea gathering with Sakurai has come to a close. We would like to thank everyone who joined us. This time, we had the opportunity to hear in detail about his journey as an artist working within the contemporary Italian art scene. The conversation concluded with a discussion of Arte Povera, a movement whose name means “poor art” and which represents a significant part of postwar Italian art. The topics covered are outlined below, following Sakurai’s notes.
● Italy and Turin The city of Turin and developments in contemporary Italian art ● Living and working as an artist in Italy Galleries and artists’ studios ● Art fairs and the position of contemporary Italian art within Europe

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I am now standing before a work by SHINYA Sakurai. There is something in Sakurai’s work that invites interpretation. Through his carefully constructed approach to painting, he exercises rigorous control over the presence and absence of motifs. His work can feel like a trap designed to preemptively disarm the stereotypical language of art criticism. It would not be entirely inaccurate to compare him to a hunter who traverses the wilderness of painting, navigating it through strategies grounded in experience. The significant change in the colors of his works this time led me to an intuition that, from a certain perspective, I might be able to grasp something fundamental that runs through Sakurai’s artistic practice.
The works are illuminated by natural light, radiating their colors onto the surrounding white walls. When the paintings receive light, they strongly evoke the places where they were created—somewhere other than here. This does not simply indicate differences in the environments through which light passes depending on the location. Rather, it suggests that painting always conveys multiple, unrepeatable experiences of light as revealed by a single source: the sun.
The technique remains much the same as in his work up to recent years: organic forms are filled in with oil paint mixed with a rich medium on supports printed with patterns such as polka dots, and symbolic images, including crosses and skulls, are pressed into the paint before it has completely hardened. This time, however, blue (AZZURRI) serves as a major theme. Moreover, unlike his earlier works, which employed an all-over, static composition to submerge the symbolic themes created through imprinting deep within the pictorial surface, the canvases are now divided into multiple sections by the composition. Various related hues, including different blues and greens, create tonal gradations that are at once clear and complex. The fluidity thus brought to the pictorial surface moves away from the impression of his earlier works, where a colorful yet abstract and anonymous world unfolded. Instead, it evokes something tangible, akin to the sensation of the Mediterranean Sea—a quality rooted in the land, its colors, its brightness, and its wind.
Mushroom-like forms that bring to mind HIROSHIMA, his birthplace; blues reminiscent of the sea; and crosses, skulls, and other symbols—all these elements in Sakurai’s paintings function as signs and symbols revolving around life and death. Through the rhythmic movement of color and form, they continually and intensely exchange places, moving back and forth across multiple canvases. In recent years, the development of his compositions, in which abstraction has gained the upper hand over symbolism, has contributed to increasing the intensity of his works. This time, however, the fluid development of the pictorial surface seems to return these intensified canvases to the very source of the painter’s inner world, where symbolism once again swirls. I regard him as a rare painter who, while meticulously preparing formal and compositional pathways, never loses the substance of his work—in fact, allows it to emerge even more forcefully.
UEDA Kazuhiko