Ai Kowada Gallery is going to present a solo exhibition, "The World a Painting Sees" by Seia Suzuki. Attracted keen attention with several prizes, such as Mitsubishi Corporation Art Gate Program or Tokyo Wonder Wall, Suzuki won VOCA prize 2012 still being a M.A. student at Tama Art University. His huge painting left such a deep impact that it immediately became a part of the exhibitor's private collection. Suzuki is one of the most expected young painters.
The series, "The World a Painting Sees", which he worked on for a couple of years, was one of the main themes in his works. Many art critics were interested in and mentioned to this tricky title. Suzuki himself explained it thinking of May Ray, American Modernist Artist. If a painting had eyes in that May Ray considered a camera as eyes of mechanics, the world a painting sees could be the one presented on a canvas through a painter. This world must be different from the one a painter himself sees or the one he had in his mind, because it would be interpreted in the process of painting. Suzuki was fascinated by this inevitable distance form artist's intentions and regarded it as "what a painting makes an artist paint." His native curiosity and sincere efforts to understand something above him must be an essential part of his works.
Suzuki showed an interesting contrast between a conservative media, oil painting, and a creative method especially in the process from taking sketches to constructing canvases. For one of his originality is in his sketches. He sketched in words, that means taking notes instead of making rough drawings. Trying different techniques and materials such as charcoal drawings and photographs to make a sketch, he found out being able to be free from perspective with sketching in words. That's because he could take each element out of a scene with memos, as images appeared in his mind word-by-word or sentence-by-sentence. For some pieces at this exhibition, he challenged to taking memos in English in order to see whether a language as a culture left him any difference. For another, he painted without drafts or constructing a canvas by reading through his memos. Instead, he worked on each element in the scene one by one with the order of a memo, making himself clear that an accurate structure or a beautiful shape was out of his interest.
Suzuki believed painting "asking a question" by himself. He was intrigued by what is going on, when he painted the world he saw in three dimensions on two-dimensional canvas. What could be altered and how? How do I perceive objects in the first place? Distant from mere self-expression typical to young artists, his questions through painting got to almost as far as epistemology or ontology.
Courtesy of Ai Kowada Gallery
