JAPANESE | ENGLISH
Darryl Jingwen Wee ( Head of Visual Arts, Asia, BLOUIN ARTINFO )
Source: "VOCA 2014 The Vision of Contemporary Art" Exhibition Catalog
Ogawa Haruki's first solo show at Frantic Gallery,"Irritated Figures"(2009), was an impressive debut by the then twenty-four year old artist, who created virtuosic, self-referential paintings that combined dense, intertwined clusters of painted squiggles, smudges, and swishes with judiciously placed blank, gaping intervals. The animal figures in these works, however effective they may have been in extending the emotional reach of Ogawa's tremulous touch, ultimately distracted from key issues that were unfolding in the main work itself.
For his second one-man exhibition, "The Accumulation Spreads"(2013) ,Ogawa discarded the false crutch of these figures, which helped his new works gain much focus and intensity. Here, his formal and conceptual concerns took on amplified, overwhelmingly voluminous proportions that literally and metaphorically overflow the oppressive constraints of the canvas. Bands of paint writhe, twist, and somersault
over each other in a discordant interplay that collapses not just figure and ground, but also visually perceptible distinctions between medium and support . For Ogawa, a canvas is not a two-dimensional support whose flatness is to be tautologically affirmed, but a dynamic and elastic starting point ― almost a kind of springboard that propels his oil and alkyd pigments into space.
Not content to work merely with a single conception of what a painterly support might be, Ogawa has also begun deploying off-white canvases in subtle chromatic variations that further complicate and diversify our visual perception of these hectic, jostling spaces, in which brushstroke, texture, color, and patterning all take on an equal importance in the construction of these painterly "cubes", as Ogawa calls them.
For the artist, painting is an implicit three-dimensional volume whose surface displays only the top layer of a subcutaneous accumulation, as it were ― the mechanical workings and hidden armatures that lie beneath this surface are concrete devices to be accounted for and resolved. This is the thrilling contradiction that Ogawa has been exploring in a productive way for several years now ― pictorial volume,
represented with paint, whose three-dimensional materiality both affirms and transcends the "picture" that we see on his canvas.
Rodion Trofimchenko ( Frantic Gallery Director )
Source: Frantic gallery (https://www.frantic.jp/ja/artist/artist-ogawa.html)
The “Albertian model” proposes to perceive a painting as “a window opened to another reality”. Modern Art stresses the surface of the canvas itself. Japanese artist Haruki Ogawa rethinks the basics of this topology. He perceives the canvas of painting as a plane that releases interplaying elements into the space in front. Discharging elements that are in process of multi-directed and synchronous transformation, while spreading and occupying space of the picture and “beyond”, paradoxically preserve its volumes, shades and effect of perspective. Ogawa works with hyper-dynamic three-dimensional abstraction, where non-concrete objects possess illusion of physical presence while keeping moving forward, around and back into the plane of the canvas.
In his recent paintings, while working on idea of “echo” and “resonance”, Ogawa develops the basic structure of the painting and using canvases of different colour tones and textures bring them into the visual dimension of depicted actions. For instance, “Correlation IV” consists of cotton-hemp
(left part) and hemp (right part) canvases which participate in the painting interplaying and merging with depicted planes and semi-spheres. In this way, seemingly the closest to the viewer plane is actually in many cases the physical plane of the canvas itself which due to effects of shades and layers looks like painted and covering one.
While expanding his artistic practise to another media, in his recent series of works called “Roentgenpainting” Ogawa experiments with coloured resin and matter of different texture and geometric qualities to expose the intriguing labyrinth of painting, which for the artist from the beginning was perceived not as a surface, but as an object. Roentgainpaintings puzzle the viewer with the complicated network of pictures elements when it is seen from the front side, reveals the layers of the structure separately when it is seen from the side and then complicates the image and perplex the viewer again showing visually inextricable knot of elements from the back. This way the object works as X-Rey machine that reviles for a moment a structure of “oil on canvas” usually hidden from the viewer.
This way Ogawa’s works become a fast expanding number of paradoxes of permanently shifting “further”-“closer”, “under”-“over” as well as “going out” – “coming in”. While triggering the endless play of patches, his painting-object unstoppably redefines itself, transforms, reconstructs itself in something different, and then something different, and different.
copyright © 2018 Haruki Ogawa all rights reserved.