DAISUKE FUKUNAGA

Executives labourers exquisite stenographers Criss-cross Monday through Saturday four times daily Three times every morning sirens groan At the lunch hour a rabid bell barks Apollinaire, Zone, Alcools, 1913

A sleeping man holds in a circle around him the sequence of the hours, the order of the years and worlds. Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann, 1913

I prefer the bizarre to the bland.¹ Girodet

Waiting as Time Shifts is Daisuke Fukunaga’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. He was previously a part of the unusual line-up of My Chérie Coco at L’Institut français in Tokyo², an exhibition that was itself the continuation of The Sentimental Organisation of the World³, held at the gallery in 2020. Since graduating from the Tama Art University in the early 2000s, Fukunaga has continued to roam freely, almost distractedly, amongst the heritage of nihonga and yoga, the anime of his childhood and his personal experience - an early anchoring point for his work - including his many side jobs: photographer at a studio of family portraiture, cartographer at Google, worker at a waste incineration facility... This experience, when doubled with his everyday observation of working people, becomes the subject of his main profession: painting. A hand that holds a brush is worth a hand that holds a broom, so one could dare say after Rimbaud. A Season in Hell was published in 1873, right in the middle of that “century of hands.” If in France, time isn’t yet completely synchronised throughout the territory, in Japan, in that exact year, the country adopted the fixed 24-hour day, as well as the Gregorian calendar, thus brutally losing all hourly variation, paving the way for a longer and quantifiable working day.

In Fukunaga’s work, we are however very far from any notion of social realism. The ethereal paintings in the exhibition, their soft light, make for an untethered ensemble, drifting outside of measured time, where work is merely a point of departure. Often viewed from above, his figures are engulfed within another kind of duration, far from Apollinaire’s groaning siren. Their bodies flow gently into fog or dream, while tools - a sickle, a glove, a broom, a strimmer - seem to remain in focus, on the surface of the work: a matte, thinly-painted surface, as though washed, where the weave of the canvas can be glimpsed. Memories, the artist says, eventually rise to the surface, painting and observing the work at the same time.⁴ The artist says himself that while each profession has its own gestures, it’s in a worker’s attitude, in their moments of rest, that their own personality appears.⁵ He even says it about himself: when at work, he becomes absorbed in a task, then takes a break, his eyes glaze over, and he starts to “merge with the place around him” “I feel as though another world opens up.”⁶ This deep and deliberate evasion of norms and constraints is exactly what gives his paintings their particular colour. Contrary to the heroic, toiling worker - who populated nineteenth century French painting for example - the employee, here, is often languorous.

Through using colours unrelated to the places that they depict - space deformed as though by a magnetic field⁷ - Fukunaga plunges his subjects and objects within a fictional world, a utopia even, where clocks no longer master time and instead float, like in Melt into Surrender. Where the edges of a dream invade space, like in At the Edge of a Dream. Where “machines of flesh and blood”⁸ suspended in liminal space, are turned off at last, portrayed with evanescent grace in Golden Time. In these paintings that “prefer the bizarre to the bland,” as Girodet once said - where figures go away, consume nothing, and don’t produce anything either - one can start to sense our contemporary era, which has made rest just another task to tick off a list. Looking at Fukunaga’s work, the sequence of hours - of years and worlds, as Proust wrote - we glimpse the painter’s words: confronted with passing time, we feel “connected to something”⁹ that exists before us, and beyond us.

Translated by Aodhan Madden

1 - An expression that the painter Girodet often repeated to his students, quoted in the exhibition catalogue Girodet, 1767-1824, edited by Syvain Bellenger, Paris, Musée du Louvre, Gallimard, 2005. 2 - Mon Chérie Coco, Institut français, Tokyo, 2024, exhibition conceived alongside Naoki Sutter-Shudo and Ernst Yohji Jaeger, featuring works by Yoshitaka Amano, Julien Ceccaldi, Koichi Enomoto, Léonard Foujita, Daisuke Fukunaga, Yasuaki Hamada, Hanayo, Kyoko Idetsu, Ernst Yohji Jaeger, Marie Laurencin, Jonny Negron, Yu Nishimura, Alexandra Noel, Louise Sartor, Setsuko, Naoki Sutter-Shudo. 3 - The Sentimemental Organisation of the World, Crèvecoeur, Paris, 2020, organised with Naoki Sutter-Shudo, featuring works by C-Brushammer, COBRA, Miho Dohi, Kenji Ide, Ulala Imai, Soshiro Matsubara, Julien Monnerie, Koji Nakano, Yu Nishimura, Alexandra Noel, Louise Sartor, Hiroshi Sugito, Naoki Sutter-Shudo, Yui Yaegashi. 4 - Daisuke Fukunaga, notes for Waiting as Time Shifts, 2026. 5 - As expressed by the artist in the press release for Labor, exhibition at Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo, 2020. 6 - Daisuke Fukunaga, notes for Waiting as Time Shifts, 2026. 7 - Press release for Labor, Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo, 2020. 8 - Paul Lafargue, Le Droit à la paresse [The Right to Laziness], 1880, chapter III. 9 - Daisuke Fukunaga, notes for Waiting as Time Shifts, 2026.