Frantic Gallery is glad to invite you to the solo show of Naoki Sasayama who uses self-produced watercolors to create the image of catastrophe with high density and insisting presence.

Fluctuating between abstract and concrete, unformed and shaped, the bodies of machines and humans exhibit the potential of colorful (in)organics, the aesthetic powers of collision, eruption and mergence. As before, Sasayama mixes glycerin, pigment, ethanol and other materials to create his own “water”-colors, his personal substances which are far from the essence of water but rather disturbingly close to the visual and tactile character of meat and mud. Thus, it is not only a representation of the accident, but the accidentality of substance itself that is shown on his “tableau vivant”.

Sasayama develops his inescapable topic of death and catastrophe by adding “plane crash” as a subject of his work: faster collapse, stronger impact, wider consequences. In the same time he intensifies the scene of the accident by bringing in the observer, in this way clashing the oppositions of “pre-“ and “post-“ so radically distinctive in cataclysm. “The Catastrophic Spectator” is the one who introduces the position of dumb calmness in face of The Explosion; it is The Shock as a point of view on instantaneous fatal change. The title of the exhibition hints as well on the artist himself, who for many years stages and recreates the Bad Luck. Finally, “The Catastrophic Spectator” is as well the position of exhibition visitor who is going to confront not only the image of the disaster but a painting itself as a catastrophe: on the verge of bearable subjects, almost too close to totally unformed and always ready to collapse in its material base, into unrepresentable matter.