Painting as a System : Harboring the sense that producing painting as “self-expression” arising from direct, subjective acts of portrayal, in which the painter paints while gazing on and contemplating the object, would be inapplicable in today’s world where everything is systematized, Akira Yanagisawa is engaged in dismantling all the formal attributes and formats of conventional painting and setting up efficiently structured, multi-stage mechanical production processes, and by interposing aspects of uncertainty and his own corporeality, he presents a world of paintings that act as fluidly generative systems. The images are obtained by computer according to a fixed set of rules, whereby regular and irregular variations are applied to perspective-derived lattice structures and abstract geometrical shapes. After undergoing a procedure of pouring and fixing acrylic paints onto panels masked with pattern paper, the images are then transferred as layers of paint, or on occasion, converted and reproduced into cut-out sticker-sheets or acrylic boards that are precut using specialized equipment. Interposing his own body, even as he sets up an imagery of fixed materials that is extracted in single cross-sections from a ceaseless flow of formative changes and implicit with infinite variations, Yanagisawa’s process is one that is steeped in wavering and contradiction. That process, and its bipolar output, which is his “painting as a system”, can be regarded as paradoxically exposing the painterly conditions of painting itself, and also as unraveling from inside-out the contradictory situation in which we live, with our flesh-and-blood bodies in this highly informatized world, and silently posing possibilities for opening the way to a new phase of being. (text by ACG)