Frantic Gallery is honored to present the exhibition of two emerging Japanese artists, showing works created with unprecedented technique and consequent visual qualities. “Alternative Lines” Exhibition offers new possible approaches to traditional fine art and different perspective on 3-dimentional aspects of art of painting.
Atsushi Takahashi squeezes paint on canvas creating "oil carpets" which offer colorful interplay of numerous oil-tubes at close inspection and a definite image with rich characters and complicated situations from afar. The artist uses canvas and oil, but no brushes and strokes. Squeezed oil paint brings the representation forward emphasizing its material dimension, volume and even smell. It is painting done exclusively with traditional media, but with a new dimension created by its massive network of oil threads. Takahashi’s images permanently fluctuate between image and substance, spirit and mess, imitation and sticky material.
Cousteau Tazuke also creates paintings: his works are two dimensional planes with acrylic paint. Nevertheless, the line he creates is essentially sculptural. The artist carves clear acrylic panels, pours acid-colored paint in the resulting cavities and then exhibits these works backwards. In this way Tazuke subverts the opposition of the front and the rear - the positive and negative - of the picture: the onlooker faces the back of the painting seeing colorful substances through transparent acrylic resin. The line here is nothing but stretched (carved) emptiness or, to be precise, colored cavity. As in Takahashi’s case Tazuke’s line has a volume and introduce 3-dimentional element in painting, but here it is created inside the picture plane and emphasizes vibrating lightness but not the weight of material used to create an image.
Presented exhibition brings together and compare two artistic researches, two possible directions for art of painting of the 21st century. “Alternative Lines” by Takahashi and Tazuke rework the foundations of painterly representation pushing forward visual potential of its primal elements: space, line and material.
