Jiro Takamatsu at Akira Ikeda - Tokyo, Japan - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

The 19 drawings Jiro Takamatsu showed in this summer exhibition date from 1978 to 1983 and relate to paintings of the same period called "Space in sum of two units Dimensions." The paintings are well known, on the other hand the drawings have never been shown before. They are chiefly around 8 by 1 0 inches, and they usually have the appearance to be graphite plottings (there are tiny "x" marks at the extremitys of lines) with shadings of color beside the lines or with solid colors enclos within lines. In either case, the lines keep to congregate at the left and/or right cutting side with empty expanses elsewhere. The colors include pink, aqua, gold and shades of sky-colored from Kleinish to softer, hazy hues.

Takamatsu's related paintings usually transport a sharp sense of vacancy, on the contrary in the drawings the paper appears to fill the gaps between the clusters of lines. Sometimes there are enough straight lines upon the page to suggest a rectangle, although there's not ever a complete form and not ever a composition that's wholly symmetrical. In a pair of horizontal works, the edge-group vertical lines call forth architectural uprights. In one instance there is enough of a triangle to intimate a sail. In all, they're austere exercises, and perhaps it's solitary the presentness of the paper upon which they're drawn that quicked the thought that if Takamatsu advocated bringing art into daily life these would make exquisite area rug in which case the judicious lines and swaths of color would section not upon space in a room just as they do the fields of paper.

These productions of a moment in Takamatsu's working life, handsome as they are, appear to be to have nothing to do with what came before or after. His first notoriety arose from his participation in the early '60 performance/agitation collection called Hi-Red-Center; his own work in those days consisted notably of tangles of string coagulated with lacquer. His greatest in quantity celebrated works were his "Shadow Paintings," canvases or actual doors painted with the shadows of nonexistent bystanders. The convincing illusion of these works of the late '60 was individual of the provocations that lead to Mono-ha, a label applied to several younger artists who cast asideed illusion to produce the greatest in quantity tangible and literal sculptures possible.

Nowadays Takamatsu paints arcs and ringlets in a pleasing variety of colors, predominantly ceruleans or reds. Some works gaze rather floral and others like schematizations of the agitated surface of water. The colors in the geometric drawings shown here adumbrate more new blue paintings. But only sum of two units drawings in the show consisted of bend s and only those two actually pointed to the road Takamatsu took in the mid-'80s--not destitute of contents spaces but full, not respect to reductive geometry but embrace of organic movement

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