frantic gallery is pleased to present “frantic drawings” exhibition.
“drawings” proposes artistic expression that manifests transformation of objects, fusion of represented bodies, stressed materiality of a picture or unpredicted movement of artist’s hands. Being opened to experiment and research, drawing makes possible aesthetic experience of “spot” and “accident”, “incompleteness” and “indefiniteness”.
“frantic”, while meaning “agitated state” or “being out of control”, first hints on the character of unrestrained art of drawing itself, while in the same time stresses a particularity of drawn “altered bodies”, “visualized metamorphoses”, “destruction of a figure”, “intensity” and “unfolding”.
“frantic drawings” depict injury of things, clash of bodies, cruel merge of previously separate entities. Thus, “Bat Boy” of Ryoji Suzuki, first, synthesizes words “bad” and “bat” in the title of the work that depicts “a bad boy with a bat”, than, it shows a figure of a hooligan covered with white lines of bandage. Naoki Sasayama produces special pigments of watercolors to draw destroyed in auto catastrophe cars. Bodies in his works are mixed with metal of a vehicle and objects of surrounding landscape, composing filled with life “semi-organic carpets” and “catastrophic mutations” of metal and flesh.
“frantric drawings” generate vortex of figures and abstract tie of images. Aya Ohnishi creates room where intestines-like-tubes and parasite-like-ribbons interweave with each other giving birth to the Gordian Knots of representations. Recent research of Shu Ohno dedicated to Memory, Childhood and a figure of Huge Slag is represented by its last developments: the body of the worms and masses of slag attack apartment houses and untroubled daily life.
Finally, “frantic drawings” are pulling depicted figures to the extremes of abstract and concrete. Haruki Ogawa just with one spot and few thrown on paper accident lines of ink creates a figure of a man and rather definite emotional atmosphere. Taisuke Mohri, persistently struggling to overcome his already inhuman technical strength, reinforces depiction of barely seen details of a face thus pushing the portrait beyond “natural”, “mimetic”, “similar” and, eventually, “recognizable” and “concrete”.
“frantic drawings” exhibition, while radically manifesting features of watercolor and pencil, presents figures “out of control” and, since “frantic” is not only a word of the exhibition title, but a part of the gallery name as well, it is eventually proposes to its organizers, participants and guests to think about the identity of frantic gallery and frantic figures it is associated with.
Curated by Rodion Trofimchenko
