HAGIWARA PROJECTS is very pleased to present the solo exhibition of new works by Takeshi Masada. This exhibition will feautre his sculpture and installation works as well as the new paintings.

Through the use of images from TV and the internet, zombie movies, and photographs from anthropology/science magazines, Masada transposes them into oil paintings with bold brushstrokes and vibrant colors, creating pieces that provoke discussion about the boundary between reality and fiction, between the physical world and the self. In a piece he exhibited last year, Masada juxtaposed a scene from a movie and a real landscape on one screen, saturating the piece with ambiguous meaning.

For this exhibition, Masada goes back to the source of the artist himself, engaging in works that seek out the motivation behind creation. These pieces directly confront the mixture of textural materiality and the images contained within the painting, with solid forms made from melted Cray-Pas that look like flowers, or spewing magma, or even living organisms, and which encapsulate the physical embodiment as well as the accidental nature of material as it trickles down. In an installation consisting of rows of photograph and magazine clippings on the walls, printed on a thin, transparent membrane, every image, each one of which has had an impact on the artist’ s worldview, resonates in its own way, and the viewers are able to experience the genesis of a new sense of narrative.

By placing these works in parallel, Masada directly communicates the pure enjoyment of painting, and pushes for a discussion around the images and an exploration into their ambiguity. Amidst his sincere engagement in contemporary forms of information and expression, he again revisits the origin of his own process of creation, with this exhibition as an attempt to reaffirm the purity of painting and the intensity of raw existence.

Courtesy of Hagiwara Projects