Born in 1976, Sasaki completed the MFA degree program in the Department of Mural Painting, Tokyo University of the Arts, Tokyo, 2002. While in the program, among other experimental works, he executed several installations with everyday objects and videos. Sasaki’s most successful achievement in this period was probably “bat”, video piece created while he was wandering around the street dragging a metallic baseball bat. Being dragged all the way, the bat continuously touches the ground, making different noises as an interaction with different textures of the land surface. Attracting a lot of attention, this piece was invited to many video screenings including one held as part of the renowned music festival “Sonar 2006”, Barcelona.
And then, around 2008, Sasaki suddenly turned to a painter whose paintings, surprisingly, had quite classical, realistic looks. In the group exhibition “Geba Geba Summer Show” at Misako & Rosen gallery, Tokyo, 2009, the artist exhibited two oil paintings, respectively depicting a plastic bottle of Contrex and a portable radio. The artist’s thorough attitude to try to depict the subjects as precisely as possible gave the paintings both dark shade and disquieting transparency, enabling them to radiate some kind of distinctively unusual aura. In such a manner, Sasaki explores the possibility of the classical way of painting - to gaze at an everyday object intently and depict all of its details and changing light qualities accurately - as a potentially positive and aggressive attitude in the today’s situation.
Titled “Still Live”, this exhibition consists mainly of the series of huge paintings depicting audio equipments such as turntable, amplifier, mixer, and so forth, as well as a related series of paintings and drawings depicting things inseparable from music events, such as glasses of alcoholic beverage, small accessories, trash, etc.
As a result of the accumulation of Sasaki’s intent gaze at the subjects, as if staring at an attractive woman on the street, and the layers of his relentless brushstrokes trying to depict the subjects more meticulously beyond his skill, these paintings appear quite stout and solid, showing a world totally different from conventional hyper realistic paintings.
Needless to say, no matter how patiently and relentlessly the painter tries to depict those audio equipments, and no matter how deliberately he composes them in the gallery space, it is impossible to recreate roaring noise, bustle, or temporality of a real live concert. Emphasizing the unbridgeable gap between the organic flow of time in reality and the stillness of paintings, the whole installation serves, so to speak, as a “soundless music festival”.
The show also includes about 20 pencil drawings. We are delighted to welcome you to our first solo exhibition with the artist.
