TANA
Gallery Bookshelf
TOKYO | KANDA
| 150309 | Kei Houraku pictoeurhythmics 2015.03.09 (Mon) - 07.31 (Fri) @ Cafe 104.5 |
TANA Gallery Bookshelf is pleased to announce an exhibition of Japanese artist Kei Houraku at cafe 104.5 in Ochanomizu, Tokyo. The exhibition "pictoeurhythmics" (picto- + rhythm + eurythmics) features his recent experimental painting works made almost accidentally through playful improvisation with ordinary supplies for the ink-jet printer.
His ludic appropriation of mass-produced/consumed material is, however, not necessarily a subversive gesture to mass consumption but rather a fully positive attempt to exhaust latent possibilities disregarded in the given systematic consumption. Freed from the mechanical process to replicate an image arranged on the grid, of any resolution, ink and the paper depart from the digital-grid constrain and reveal their hitherto limited physical capabilities in turn. Instead of aiming at a single point on the projected virtual coordinates, ink starts floating over numerous microscopic ink-trap slits on the ink-jet print paper, filling them and leaving traces as it freely flows, runs off, spreads, curves, turns, collides or stays there, which achieves far more vivid color saturations and literally resolution-free continuum. Still, unlike water color or any other painting using liquid materials, the paper remains so perfectly flat that it annihilates material touch and volume at all, as the ink-jet print paper is designed to keep colors at the very +/-0 level against the surface. Thus, the single physical layer captures a lot of layers of accidents and improvisations. With a unique set of two qualities, anti-grid continuum and apparently de-materialistic flatness, Houraku improvises colors and shapes for primitive fun of painting.
Along with the exhibition at cafe 104.5, TANA Gallery Bookshelf also holds a joint exhibition
with smaller pieces from the same painting series.
Kei Houraku was born in 1982 in Kagoshima Prefecture in southwest Japan, and studied multi-media art at
Tama Art University in Tokyo. Houraku works extensively on video, photograph and painting, but
regardless of the medium, his attitude maintains humorous intervention to the given contexts and
environments. Houraku has recently focused on a unique ink painting, as an attempt to redefine
photography, which utilizes ordinary print supplies produced for digital reproduction and put them
into analogue production of one-off pieces.
Kei Houraku website
cafe 104.5
WATERRAS TOWER 2F
2-101 Kandaawaji-cho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, Japan
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