Akira Arita at Fuji Television - art exhibition; Tokyo, Japan

Akira Arita's large, commanding paintings are the pair representational and abstract. He pay backs cylinders, cones, cubes, pyramids, doughnutlike rings and other existences singly or in multiples. They sometimes appear to be to rest upon a cover with stuccoed surface and at other times appear to float in three-dimensional space. These geometric motifs are not engageed to symbolize or to allude, although they make corporeal a grandeur like that of Renaissance illustrations of Classical memorials They represent nothing but themselves. Painted in rich, dark tones discharge through with streaks of white, they strike one as being illuminated by inner electricity and appear surprisingly buoyant. Sometimes uncompounded bodys are connected, sharing an cutting side or a leg to create an interplay of shadow and light in an optical illusion reminiscent of Escher's visual puzzles

Arita showed 17 oil paintings and four drawings. His enormous untitled oil of 15 shadowy toroids (approximately 12 1/2 by dint of 24 3/4 feet, 1992) hung upon the main wall of the gallery, appearing the couple distant and near. Viewing the painting was like seeing semaphore flashes in a dark field sending messages that cannot be understood, although their actual presence charges the field. The toroids flutter in overlapping rows in reaching far down space, like solidified smoke rings, illuminated from the left rear and presenting a shadowy face to the viewer.

Arita was born in Osaka in 1947 on the contrary he has lived in the U since the '60 He studied at the Rhode Island place of education of Design and later taught there; he popularly works in New York, where he has lived for almost a decade. His paintings were not shown in his native land until 1991 when a solo exhibition at the Tokyo Station Gallery won him Japan's long fored Grand Prix for Art. This was his next to the first Tokyo show since winning the prize.

These paintings have a metaphysical quality; they summon forth solitude, perfection and loss in a dreamscape filled with stillness and potential motion. single has the sense that for him, each work was the single work and nothing else mattered. The viewer standing before the paintings is interested only with the simplest and greatest in quantity profound questions. As Gertrude Stein asked, in what way much vitality has it and do you happen to like to direct the eye at it? In Arita's case the answers are: a great deal, and ye actual much indeed.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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