Takeshi Matsugami Familiar Things
In his exhibition Familiar Things, Takeshi Matsugami (1980, Nagoya, Japan) presents novel small format paintings. They are contemporary images of recognizable everyday objects, chosen at random from the artist’s immediate environment. There is no specific meaning or unexpected story behind the selected items. The artist claims: “Every day I doodle and, depending on my mood of the day, I decide what I will paint.” Everything around Matsugami can become the subject of his paintings: fruits and vegetables, CDs, images gathered from the internet, weeds, landscapes, details of hands and feet, etc. However, the absence of human portraits is notable. “As I wanted to be able to explain to my children what I was painting, I decided to represent familiar things. I had no desire to indicate who the protagonists were, I thus completely excluded humans from my work,” explains the artist.
Toys, fruits or utensils are all represented in a quite naive way and painted straightforwardly: oversimplified, mostly isolated, in low perspective and with little play between light and shadows. The black contour lines, sometimes accentuated, refer to Matsugami’s training as a graphic designer and his penchant for illustrations and manga. The artist feels that he is primarily a draftsman: that is what he has been doing for over 20 years. As a painter, he is self-taught. He has tried different styles and has been inspired by Zen paintings and the work of his favorite painters, illustrators, and designers, like Philip Guston, Giorgio Morandi, Alex Katz, Morikazu Kumagai, Mizumaru Anzai, Philippe Weisbecker and Vier5 (Marco Fiedler and Achim Reichert). But above all, Matsugami loves children’s drawings, especially drawings meant for five to nine year old’s. Fascinated by their evolution from schematic and isolated representations of “cephalopods” and “stick figures” to recognizable figures in a clear context, the artist is seduced by their unique, uninhibited and spontaneous representation of a reality familiar to children.
With a few large brushstrokes, Takeshi Matsugami tries to create a ‘screen’ as simply as possible. This brings him comfort in the midst of the discomfort of the reality that surrounds us. In doing so, he cherishes the unique opportunities and lets the failures unfold as much as possible. The perfectly painted surface does not interest the artist. On the contrary, Matsugami likes the accumulation of coarse brushed material.
Roxane Bayens
- Location
- Brussels
- Date
- —
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Selected Images
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