■Venue　　　

KANA KAWANISHI GALLERY

4-7-6 Shirakawa, Koto-ku, Tokyo 135-0021 JAPAN 

*car parking available in front of the gallery

CT006461(KKG)
2022 | lambda print | 620 × 880 mm | ©︎ Toshihiro Komatsu, courtesy KANA KAWANISHI GALLERY

KANA KAWANISHI GALLERY is pleased to present Toshihiro Komatsu’s solo exhibition “Spatial Concept: Clairvoyance Sept. 3, 2022” from September 3, 2023.

Toshihiro Komatsu, a graduate of Tokyo University of the Arts and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Graduate School of Architecture, completed a residency at the Rijksakademie Amsterdam and in New York, and has been actively working based in Europe and the United States, including solo exhibitions at MoMA PS1 and the Queens Museum of Art. Since his return to Japan, he has been active in international art festivals such as the Setouchi Triennale (2013) and the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale (2012/2015), creating site-specific installations, pavilions (temporary buildings), and other forms of visual art that renew our perception of events through the use of photographic expression.

This exhibition, his first solo show in Kiyosumi Shirakawa in three years, will be an ambitious site-specific installation utilizing the gallery space to present his CT series of penetrating photographs that cancel out the layers of architectural space. Visitors to the exhibition, which opens on September 3, 2023, are invited to experience a view through the gallery walls to see what it was like outside the gallery one year earlier on September 3, 2022. While Gordon Matta-Clark, an artist active in New York in the 1970s, updated the landscape by drilling directly into the real space of buildings, Komatsu, who uses photographic techniques, treats the walls of active buildings that are used in daily life and evokes the scenery beyond them.

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In the CT (Painting) series, which will be exhibited simultaneously, Komatsu will show the other side of paintings, developing an expression that crosses the boundary between two-dimensional and three-dimensional space. The works, which can be called both paintings and photographs, contain a sculptural concept and may be said to be a 21st-century inheritance of the “Spatialism” advocated by Lucio Fontana and others in the late 1940s and 1950s.

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Komatsu will also consider the years 2022 and 2023, one year before and after the new coronavirus swept the world, in this site-specific exhibition utilizing the Kiyosumi-Shirakawa gallery space. We cordially invite all to this ambitious exhibition that will lead viewers to a new perceiving experience.

Artist Statement

According to the “Edo wo shoshite tokyo to nasu no shosho,” September 3, 1868 was the day it was decided that Edo would be called Tokyo. One hundred and fifty-four years later, on September 3, 2022, I continuously released the shutter towards the white cube as if I were looking through it on a summer day three years after the COVID-19 pandemic had occurred in Kiyosumi Shirakawa, Tokyo. One year later, on September 3, 2023, a perspective installation and CT (KKG) will evoke the scene of the gallery from one year ago. Can the passage of time, say one year, really be visualized by comparing reality and photographs?

Until recently, I had assumed that Lucio Fontana, famous for his “Slash” paintings, was a painter, but I was surprised to learn that he was actually a sculptor. Before his “Hole” and “Slash” paintings, Fontana had been making sculptures. His physical “Hole” and “Slash” paintings are close to sculptures, without three-dimensional illusions. The CT series began with “zips” (linear lines) that virtually divided the picture plane and evolved into “holes” and then virtual slashes reminiscent of “slash” paintings.

Picasso said, “Beyond the picture, there is only a wall.” Fontana’s “Hole” series actually peeked through a hole in the canvas to reveal a wall, summoning the space around the painting into the interior of the painting. However, the back of the canvas in Fontana’s “Slash” series is covered with black gauze, making it impossible to see through the slashed canvas to the other side of the wall. While Picasso denied the trompe l'oeil, Fontana’s “Slash” is a work that uses this illusion to create the illusion of a black slash. My new work, CT (PAINTING), is a CT work based on a formal monochrome painting, oil on canvas. By using photographs to show the wall and screws beyond the painting in perspective, the space around the painting is summoned into the painting, allowing the viewer to see not only the visible world but also the depths beyond it.

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Toshihiro Komatsu

Artist Profile

Toshihiro Komatsu was born in Hamamatsu City, Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan in 1966. He received his M.F.A. at Tokyo University of the Arts, Graduate School in 1993, and his M.S. at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture.

His major solo exhibitions include “Mise en Abyme” (2022, KANA KAWANISHI PHOTOGRAPHY, Tokyo), “Aperture—Penetrating a Gaze” (2020, KANA KAWANISHI GALLERY, Tokyo), “Topophilia: Japanese Houses” (2020, KANA KAWANISHI PHOTOGRAPHY, Tokyo), “TOSHIHIRO KOMATSU” (2009, Wimbledon College of Art, London), “Sanatorium” (2006, Youkobo Art Space, Tokyo), “Clairvoyance Sept. 21, 2005” (2006, galerie 16, Kyoto, Japan), “Queens Focus 03: Adjoining Spaces” (2000-2001, Queens Museum, New York), and “Special Projects” (1999, MoMA PS1, New York).

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Group exhibitions and art festivals include “Echigo Tsumari Art Triennale 2015” (2015, Niigata, Japan), “On the Exhibition Room” (2015, CAS, Osaka, Japan), “ISLAND VIEW—Why artists focus on islands” (2014, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo), “Setouchi Triennale 2013” (2013, Kagawa, Japan), and “On Happiness: Contemporary Japanese Photography” (2003, Tokyo Photographic Art Museum).