Maki Fine Arts is pleased to present "Breathing Painting," a solo show by Fuminao Suenaga starting Saturday, April 2, 2016.
Born 1974 in Yamaguchi, Japan, Suenaga graduated from Tokyo Zokei University with a major in painting. Recent exhibitions include "railroad siding 2015" (former Tokorozawa city supply center for school meals, Saitama, 2015), "Born in 1974" (40th anniversary show -- Museum of Modern Art, Gunma, 2014), and "APMoA Project, ARCH vol. 11 Museum Piece" (Aichi Prefecture Museum of Art, 2014). He also curated Maki Fine Arts' 5th Anniversary group show "discreet abstraction" (2015).
This will be Suenaga's second solo show with Maki Fine Arts since "Houkago Remix" (after-school remix) in 2015. In "Breathing Painting," the artist has chosen items such as ropes, erasers, Post-its, copy-machine paper, and CD sleeves as motif. After measuring these everyday items, he extracts just the surface elements from motifs and draws them on panels identical in size. Through this simplification method of abbreviating the elements, the artist is able to step away from the traditional system of painting and make the viewer think what the essential meaning of painting is.

--

Hajime Nariai (Tokyo Station Gallery curator)

There's a cartoon standard depicting a scene where the lights suddenly turn off, leaving the character in complete blackness with only a set of eyes shining white in the darkness, blinking and looking this way and that way. From the perspective of sensation, I do see similarities in the behavior of looking or straining one's eyes and shining a light into darkness; it does make sense. Or, maybe the eyes are representing how the subjective consciousness works without the ability of sight when surrounded by darkness, which I can also understand very clearly. But it also makes me wonder if maybe the rendering of white eyes standing out originated from a rendering of people covered in mud and ashes, and it then got typified. In other words, I think those cartoon rendering of eyes glowing in the dark are a way of drawing darkness to resemble substance with texture, such as mud and ashes. In cartoons, darkness and shadows often have dimensions, and this is also the case with paintings.
Suenaga's works have no shadows. They look brand new, pure, light, and with a touch of charm because none of them have shadows. Maybe it is better to say that the works were formed though the lack of shadows. The artist has a series of work that looks as though he directly drew light-emitting monitors. Quite simply, the works are not a collection of light, but rather a removal of shadows, or perhaps it is about drawing negative shadows. Through this process, he depicts smoothness and brightness, which in turn, is referencing today's state of vision. On the other hand, in case of the type of works where flatness is emphasized through drawing what can be considered as patterns, the essence of the paintings is not coming from those patterns themselves, but rather from the wide expanse of homogenous surface that is void of undulations or shadows.
What is even more cleaver yet frightening is in the case of his three-dimensional works where it seems unavoidable to have actual shadows. The painted surfaces in the works appear as though they defy shadows. Suenaga's cardboard boxes and level gages show a sparse sense of reality, and even in those pieces, not a single shadow is to be found! It walks right past the lightness found in a concept copy, what we call a model. It is not the deficiency that is light, but it is the abundance. I believe the recent trend in the artist's usage of three-dimensional everyday items is due to his desire to further attract and emphasize the program--the color surface's resistance against actual shadows--with ease.