Having set his heart on becoming a painter from a young age, and subsequently graduating from Tama Art University seventeen years ago, Hidetada Karasuyama has now begun to reach maturity as a painter. Ten years ago, he went back to his hometown in Isahaya, Nagasaki, and bought an old house atop a small hill, creating his atelier amidst an idyllic  rural landscape.  He works surrounded by the countless  objects he has collected and cherished, all displayed neatly in the house. A keen collector whose proclivities range from art-objects to antiques and dolls, he has lately caught the bug for junk, with a particular fondness for scrapped motorcycles.

At our 10th exhibition Possible or Not Impossible held in 2019, Karasuyama first applied this inveterate collector’s temperament directly to his works. Over the intervening year, he has busied himself with collecting pigment. He gathers dust, leaves, and pieces of junk – anything that shows promise for use as pigment – wherever he can find them, whether the sides of busy roads, the tidal flats around the Ariake coast, or the forests and streams of nearby mountains. He grinds his finds up in a mortar, sifts them, and then carefully bottles and labels each with the date, location, and condition. He says there are several factors involved in his decision to gather each pigment, such as his empirical imagination for color development, the characteristics of the place, and the nature of the materials themselves.

Meanwhile, he has also long been engaged in work a particular piece. Karasuyama built a large square frame (270 x 270 cm) with four wooden poles, over which he stretched a translucent organdy material in lieu of canvas, where he has been painting circles and squares using tiny stippling-esque dots. The canvas wraps around the wooden poles, and the stippling continues around the frame’s edge, so that the visible range expands and contracts by a matter of millimeters depending on the viewer’s actual standpoint. He told me the idea was inspired by the roundness of the horizon. Moreover, the translucence of the canvas also enables him to work from both sides of the tableau to impart the surface with a fluctuating effect, which enables the painting to evince a range of expression, depending on the condition of the wall where it is hung, as well as the lighting.

Painters are fated to keep fixing pigment on square canvases. Karasuyama is undoubtedly a member of this curious breed. He recognized the possibility in the medium, and developed his own style through a struggle with his own painterly philosophy that everything originates from a dot. This exhibition marks his first solo presentation in six years. Visitors will experience the fruits of his time-intensive efforts rendered in his new homemade natural pigments, filling three distinct spaces in the Azumatei Project.

Jun Azumatei (contemporary artist)