Seia Suzuki’s paintings portray sceneries of mental images rooted in his own memory. He uses real places as his subjects but never captures them with a camera. Instead, he “documents” them through a brief note (texts). Photographing a landscape inevitably implies that the composition is defined by the camera’s angle of view. Suzuki intentionally avoids such framing of a scenery. To turn fragments of his memory into an image, the landscape is removed from the real world and undergoes an imperfect transformation. Suzuki does not make a draft of the composition on canvas: he paints the images as if to cram everything in. The resulting painting appears distorted and compressed, evocative of the world viewed through a fisheye lens.
The artist’s new works are painted on square supports. They are rotated as he paints, thus inverting the images. The horizon, an inherent element in a landscape, is vanished, allowing the scenery to transcend the sense of the sky and ground as well as gravity. As the exhibition’s title Scale suggests, the depicted subjects (such as trees and houses) are drastically reduced in size, thus alienating the scenery further from a reality. The extraordinary landscapes created by Seia Suzuki lure us into a distant place.

Seia SUZUKI
Born 1986 in Tokyo, Japan, Seia Suzuki received his MFA in painting from Tama Art University in 2012 and received the VOCA prize the same year. In order to understand what happens within the painting process, Suzuki takes a creative approach involving writing down the descriptions of actual scenery and then using the text descriptions to paint his canvas.