TOKYO.- Takuro Someya Contemporary Art is presenting the solo exhibition Scenery reflected in the window by Motomasa Suzuki. This is Suzuki’s first solo exhibition at TSCA in eight years, since wall, roof, window in 2016, and his first with the gallery since its relocation to Tennozu Isle in Shinagawa. Scenery reflected in the window presents a new group of wood sculptures, which form the core of Suzuki’s multidisciplinary practice. These sculptures, with their variations in scale and proximity to painting, offer an unprecedentedly immersive visual experience.
Drawing inspiration from the landscapes and architectural motifs of American films, Suzuki gives form to memories that drift between physical matter and space. His sculptures, while reminiscent of miniature replicas and dioramas, provoke a sense of estrangement through optical distortions and the manipulation of scale. Interweaving overlapping ideas and philosophies, Suzuki carves intricate scenes infused with emotional significance while navigating between the realms of image and materiality, stasis and motion, and past and present. Functioning as apparatuses that delve deeply into the memory of a place, his sculptures not only expand the horizons of contemporary sculpture but also pose fresh challenges to the sensibilities of their viewers.
Scenery reflected in the window comprises seven wood sculptures painted with images Suzuki gathered online of various scenes observed through windows. These windows, each reflecting their distinct environments—such as the Dutch bay window rich with regional specificity or the industrial frame emblematic of modernity—are brought together into a single space. The result is an uncanny “other” space, an extension of reality where visual dissonance and harmony coexist. By replacing the expected panes of glass with painted images that recall reflections, Suzuki’s sculptures guide the viewer’s gaze through the window to the landscape beyond. Yet these vistas are in fact created using acrylic paint on wooden supports, at once emphasizing their materiality and foregrounding the flatness characteristic of painting. As a motif, the window functions simultaneously as a means of connection—linking inside and outside, viewer and viewed—and as a boundary that separates. Much like a painting’s frame isolates a segment of the landscape, these sculptures quietly illuminate the subtle ambiguity of memory.
The techniques employed here emphasize the expressive surfaces of sculpture, initiating a complex dialogue between the volume of physical forms and the flatness of painted images. The two-dimensional illusions painted into the three-dimensional structures fold time and space together, much like photographs that capture and preserve fleeting moments, resisting any fixed readings in favor of open-ended interpretations. These works, made of organic materials with a soft tactility, bear traces of the sculpting process. At the same time, the reflections of light and scenery painted onto the flat planes bordered by window frames create a world within each work, where internal memories resonate with external landscapes.
The affinity between the diverse elements within Suzuki’s sculptures can at times give rise to moments of spontaneous and profound emotion. Such moments echo what Gaston Bachelard described in The Poetics of Space as “intimacy” and “memories of the unconscious.” Just as Bachelard uncovered the poetic imagination in a house’s corners or its doors and windows, Suzuki’s sculptures reconstruct landscapes as spaces of interiority, where the viewer’s memories and sensations converge. This internal space is neither the constructed image of a film nor a scene unfolding directly before one’s eyes; instead, it is a realm for wandering through the folds of memory and mending our ruptured senses—a quiet gesture toward reimagining what it means to inhabit “place” today.
Takuro Someya Contemporary Art
Translation by Eriko Ikeda Kay
Motomasa Suzuki was born in Shizuoka in 1981 and graduated from the Department of Sculpture at Musashino Art University in 2004. Solo exhibitions include Playground for the Senses, ANB Tokyo (2022), Room and Garden – The Form of Distance, Musashino Art University, Tokyo (2020), Dynamic Garden in Full Motion, Aomori Contemporary Art Center (ACAC) residency (2018), MOD, LIXIL Gallery, Tokyo (2017), wall, roof, window, Takuro Someya Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2016), MEGURURI ART SHIZUOKA 2016, Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art (2016), Cinematic Orchestra, LIXIL Gallery, Tokyo (2013), Setouchi Triennale 2013 Soy Sauce Warehouse Residence Project Autumn Session, Kawaguchi (2013), Eyes / The form / An image, Takuro Someya Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2012), The 10th Gunma Biennale for Young Artists 2010, The Museum of Modern Art, Gunma (2010), Motomasa Suzuki, Muramatsu Gallery, Tokyo (2007), Artists by Artists, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2003). In 2018, Suzuki participated in the Aomori Contemporary Art Center (ACAC) international dispatch program, completing a residency at Ateliê Fidalga in São Paulo, Brazil. Suzuki received the VOCA Encouragement Prize in 2017 and was selected as a finalist for the Taro Okamoto Award for Contemporary Art Exhibition in 2007. He has garnered international acclaim for his experimental practice that transcends the boundaries of architecture, video, and sculpture.
