Art Fair Tokyo 2022
ALIVE
Sadaharu Horio / Mitsugu Sato / Lintalow Hashiguchi
2022.3月.11(Fri) ー 3.13.(Sun) 11:00〜20:00
Place：Tokyo International Forum
booth:N032
Sadaharu Horio (1939-2018), who passed away in 2018 just before his 80th birthday, was known as a member of the Gutai Art Association, a post-war art movement that emerged mainly in the Kansai region, and pursued the truth of this world as “Ordinary Things" through his daily artistic activities.
In this exhibition, we present Sadaharu Horio's works, which were born as traces of life, the 'Ordinary Things' series, in which he used a single tube of acrylic paint of one colour every day and painted over it, and his experimental work on waste panels and scrap wood with the help of his friends based on Horio's energetic idea in 2016 that he wanted to create a gigantic work. In the result, Horio produced "A Tale of 1000 GO 1000 Pictures" series, which used acts and improvised drawings of a thousand works. And now two contemporary artists' works confront each other as they struggle, realise, evolve and continue to live in this very society.
The contemporary calligrapher Lintalow Hashiguchi (1985-), who has been in the limelight in recent years, first encountered PUNK as a teenager, which became the starting point for his creative activities, and he calls himself a 'Writer + Lamplighter = Wlighter'.
Inspired by Yuichi Inoue's idea of 'calligraphy as an art for all', which emerged in the 1960s, and sees his work as 'energy for everyday life', and has been creating works of art for daily life. He sees his work as "energy for living everyday life", and his method of writing down the inspirations and fragments of words that flash through his daily life in his notebooks overlaps with his scribble books, which is the source of Horio's artowrks. The style of production, in which Horio chose a towel as a method of production to catch his own passion, rather than existing calligraphy tools, and the body as a whole, also recalls the attitude of Horio, who continued to find true values through creation in the chaos of the post-war period. The "CRYTSTAL" series imitates, destroys and reproduces the connotations of words on a time axis, while the "MYNORMAKER" series, which moves back and forth between the future and ancient times with a focus on contemporary society, is a work that shows Hashiguchi's creative attitude of considering through the act of writing, and that traces the origin of his thoughts while imagining the act of writing letters down and the existence of people. These works seem to trace the origins of thought while imagining the act of writing and the existence of people, and strongly affirm the inherent power and way of life of the flesh-and-blood existence of human beings.
Artist Mitsugu Sato, who was selected for the Okunoto International Art Festival in 2021, experienced a mental breakdown after wandering around the world in his 20s, and arrived at the seaside in Wakayama, where he "realised that he was a drift object" as he continued to create his works using discarded drift objects. Through his work, he confronts his inner self as if to find in himself the things and chaos adrift in contemporary society, and his works are tranquil, yet they radiate a strong magnetic field and overwhelming presence. Sadaharu Horio also uses a lot of junk and waste objects collected from rubbish dumps and the streets as supports for his 'Ordinary Things' series, which also corresponds to the value shift that lies at the root of art and its underlying power to turn the conventions of our society on their head. For this exhibition, Mitsugu Sato focuses on 108 Crosses, which consists of 108 crosses, the number 108 representing the number of vexations in Eastern Buddhist thought, and the cross overlapping with the symbol of redemption in Western Christianity. The works evoke prayers and ideas that transcend both the West and the East, while excluding religious connotations, and seem to lead to a prayer for finding true values in the chaos of the times.
We hope that you will feel the way of life of these three artists, whose artistic practices, which overlap with the period from 1939 to 2022, look at and sublimate the chaos of humanity.
Gallery NAO MASAKI Nao Masaki
