UNTITLED Takashi Kayama Exhibition at TOKI Art Space, Omotesando Tokyo, May 18 – 23 2021 I wasn’t looking for it, which made the encounter all the more meaningful. I’d had a preflight CoVid test that morning, followed by a curious visit to a major (unnamed) museum of contemporary art in the area and I was on my way somewhere else when I spotted the small basement gallery in Omotesando - Aoyama. Sometimes it’s those occasions when art comes at you sideways, creating not so much an encounter as a sideways brushing past, an unexpected pause, that makes it all the more meaningful. Takashi Kayama’s solo exhibition at Toki Art Space is definitely more about the revelations of gentle journeying than arrival at decisive destinations. When I say it’s a room filled with monochrome paintings, the mind might fly to the power, scale and expansiveness of colour field painting. It isn’t that - this exhibition is not at all about that bravura tradition, rather its appeal and delight lies in paintings that are barely there. These works seem to exist in a state of emergence. It’s a place where painting first lifts itself from a prepared flat surface, a realm of beginnings, of first and tentative markings, of imminent objecthood - when a painting becomes a thing only just separated from the hand of the painter. I am a painter myself and, in full disclosure, my own works engage with this material realm of gesso and ground. It’s the first step in making a painting; a simple recipe for a white chalky liquid soup, often applied thinly and laid down softly, layer by layer. I am drawn to it because for me the process is meditative and the way clear. Gesso conflates the idea with the material, and that idea is not emptiness or void, but potential. A ground of gesso is quiet and open, ready to absorb whatever happens next. I felt I had found a kindred spirit in this artist and there he was among his paintings, on the first day of the exhibition. よろしくおねがいします. We met and found that while we could not speak the same language, through painting, we had a mutual language in the space between gesso and before gesture. At Toki Art Space, Kayama’s suite of paintings are painted on panel and simply titled by date of completion. A minimum requirement for recognition as painting is arguably a gallery lined with rectangular planes. These timber panels, all made by the artist, have softly rounded edges and their surfaces are created by sanding back through layers of paint into the ground beneath, opening up the porosity of the gesso to patterns of chance as remnant paint. I think of mottled shadows flickering on a wall, marks of weathering or reflections on a pond, a movement from opacity to translucence. Slowly, a colour revealed itself as a gradual retinal adjustment, and only after lingering and looking a while. The monochrome is not the white ground of gesso but yellow. An artist I greatly admire 1 once said to me that the colour yellow is so alluring because it is the colour of joy, but also of madness. Here, I italicise because she spoke in French and that language seems to deepen the saying of it, joy – la joie while la folie softens the edge and suggestion of madness. In the back room, the gallery lighting was perhaps inclined to blue which in turn seemed to give Takashi’s paintings a very slight cast of dappled greenery.
1 Barbara Halnan, b. UK, Australian. Lives and works Sydney.