HIROTO TOMONAGA

The artist has provided the following statement for the exhibition.

The Chinese character for “lightning” is composed of a character for “rain” on top and one for “field” on the bottom.

The current version of the character is an abbreviation of earlier versions, which had three of the field characters arranged in a pyramid. In even older versions, a line resembling a lightning bolt danced between and around a number of forms, such as dots or field characters.

A line, and divided forms.

Compressed, they remain a single unit, but the individual elements tremble, butting up against each other.

Structuring the three characters for field in a pyramid was also used to compose characters expressing how things piled against one another and made rumbling sounds.

Lightning has no thickness or volume, but possesses sufficient pressure to divide and stir things around. That sense of something thin and untouchable functioning as a presence with a certain hardness or stiffness seemed to be synonymous with my practice.

Since I rub, press, and extend the paint on the canvas surface, I increasingly think about how things spread across a plane and about collisions. The forms that are rubbed cancel each other out, and the picture becomes more difficult to read. Nevertheless, it doesn’t become weaker. On the contrary, as multiple reactions fill the canvas, it gains strength,seeming “hard” to me.

When faced with something unfamiliar or difficult to read, we feel stress. In that sort of situation, I stiffen up my body and take the time to look at things.

Hiroto Tomonaga captures transitory moments in which things he is looking at appear to him ever so briefly as something else, and strives to render this in painting. In his practice, this change that occurs before his eyes gradually translates into paint on the canvas, becoming fixed on the surface. While the resulting paintings are fixed, they feel as if they might resume moving once again, and express the sense of helplessness the artist himself feels regarding the world he sees before him.

Tomonagaʼs paintings have a distinctive surface texture. He creates a surface that, while not physically thick, possesses depth, by building the paint up with the brush, kneading it, or layering it. There seems to be an intensity to the canvas, almost as if it were pulsating or breathing, but also somehow heading towards oblivion, and yet in a way that is by no means subtle. Seeing his paintings in the flesh produces a much more powerful impression than seeing them on a screen.

Tomonaga carries a notebook, briefly sketching memorable landscapes and noting down words that he comes across in his daily life, then ruminating on them. When this act extends to his painting practice, the images and ideas in his mind come into being, using the method described above, hovering and wavering, but without taking clear form.

The indeterminate nature of Tomonagaʼs art defies language and earthly logic, unsettling the world in which we live comfortable, albeit constrained, lives. In recent works, he has been building a sense of fullness that seems to jump off the painting surface, achieved by fixing onto a single canvas the numerous reactions that result from making different elements collide. This show, “Lightning,” will present about ten new paintings.