PORTLAND, ORE.- Adams and Ollman is presenting the first solo exhibition of the U.K.-based Japanese artist, Tomoya Matsuzaki, in the United States. The exhibition includes new wall-based paintings on irregularly shaped panels combined with found objects, as well as a selection of pastel drawings on found paper.
A number of Matsuzaki's recent works include the term “bascule” in their titles. Most commonly, this refers to a seesaw dynamic exploited by structures including the numerous bridges to be found near Matsuzaki's studio in east London. In another sense, “bascule” can describe the gracefully arced form of a horse as it leaps over a barrier: a form as perfect as there is to be found in nature, and a familiar enough subject among painters in Britain, where the artist has lived since the late 1990s. The carefully articulated forms which animate his paintings occasionally suggest both an ideogrammatic language of structural elements in tension as well as gauzy impressions of moons (and phases thereof), maps, islands, root networks, and other natural phenomena. The idea of the bascule provides a useful frame for understanding Matsuzaki's polysemous and wide-ranging practice, in which the natural and the man-made appear as two sides of the same coin.
The long industrial history of Matsuzaki's studio neighborhood surfaces frequently in his work in the form of diminutive objects discovered at low tide while mudlarking in the nearby river (where efforts are underway to preserve the fragile local ecosystem). The items he finds, simultaneously timeless and specific, are sorted in the studio and presented on narrow shelves he calls “piers,” which jut out from the surface of some of the paintings. Pipes, miniature bottles, ceramic fragments, and other curiosities, long discarded and shorn of their original context, appear both as survivors from an earlier urban moment and as worthy of admiration on their own, ahistorical, terms. His newest works have an increasing ambition, scale, and complexity, often comprising interlocking panels of irregular shapes.
These organically-shaped panels simultaneously allow the imagery to float free of the implied window of traditional painting and bind it still more into the painting's support: a support both “natural” and constructed. A viewer no longer has the sensation of looking through a window at something, but becomes, in examining the painting's distinct sense of atmosphere, increasingly aware of its physical properties. With their multiple planes, the works suggest a duality of experience: the still life juxtaposed with the landscape, perhaps, or what Prunella Clough (another Londoner) called “urbscapes” set against something altogether more abstract.
Matsuzaki's softly-softly application of areas of paint gradually creates edges which over time begin to sediment into the structure-like forms which traverse foreground and background in these works. In this way he does not set out to depict a particular scene or likeness but rather enables the imagery to emerge through his process. This method and palette reveals something of Matsuzaki's personal history. Over nearly thirty years in the U.K., he has assimilated into his work a quintessentially British palette of muted grays, greens, and blues, and developed an intuitive grasp of the long coexistence of landscape and abstraction in modern British art, drawing on forebears including Paul Nash and Peter Lanyon, even perhaps some of the open decorative motives of Bloomsbury.
Matsuzaki's engagement with the landscape also takes the form of extensive foraging, a practice which he began during the Covid-19 pandemic in a deliberate effort to learn more about his longtime home. “Part of being an artist is finding your own language, your own way of seeing,” remarks Matsuzaki. “So I started paying attention to small things—even just, 'what is this tree in front of my house?' That led me into foraging: plants that are common here but not in Japan, and vice versa—plants that are symbolic of a season in one culture but unknown in the other.” This practice of collecting culminates in meals or handmade pigments and inks distilled from the day's finds.
On view in the exhibition will be drawings made on irregular sheets of found paper, among them discarded supermarket bags and delivery packaging. Though carefully unfolded, their imperfect surfaces, marked by creases and rips, become the ground for atmospheric renderings of the space summoned in the paintings: a field of intuitive, frenetic marks where fragmented shapes and partial forms merge while others remain hidden behind a volume of air, almost as if they are covered by misty rain or thick fog. In conjuring subtle atmospheres from discarded elements, these modest drawings capture the essence of Matsuzaki's work in its effort to describe the histories we inhabit and the landscapes we are constantly remaking.
In conjunction with the exhibition, the gallery will publish a conversation between the artist and Dr. Justin Dunnavant, the Joan Silsbee Chair of African Cultural Archaeology at The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
Born in 1977 in Fukuoka Prefecture, Japan, Matsuzaki received his BA from Central Saint Martins and his MA from Chelsea College of Art and Design. He has exhibited extensively in the United Kingdom, Europe, and Japan, and his work was included last year in a major group exhibition at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art Kanazawa. This is his first exhibition in the United States.
