Color Walls
ART IN TIME & STYLE MIDTOWN vol.23
Mineo Sakata and Kai Nakayama
July 21 – August 31, 2023
We are pleased to present “Color Walls,” an exhibition featuring artists Mineo Sakata and Kai Nakayama.
In 2014, an exhibition titled “Color Walls” was held simultaneously at Time & Style’s Roppongi and Futakotamagawa showrooms. In that exhibition (planned jointly by Itazu Litho-Grafik and Time & Style), different wall colors painted in different areas with Time & Style’s original paint, and lithographic artworks printed in ink of the same colors as the wall paint, combined to form a mimetic spatial art installation featuring Time & Style space/walls/interiors and lithographs. That project focused on the wall colors existing in a space. In the exhibition, the way those colors and artworks were arranged gave visitors a feeling of the actual space through the intermediary of “wall color” together with works of art.
This new exhibition marks a new phase in the development of “Color Walls.”
The act of “coloring walls” remains as it was in the previous exhibition. This time, however, that act exists in the context of the two artists’ “expression,” and the way of engaging with “wall color” and turning it into creative expression has been left up to each artist.
While making use of photographic and video imagery, Mineo Sakata’s works have at their core a strong feeling of painting-like thought and expression.
Though it puts expression into pictorial and three-dimensional forms, Nakayama’s art does not depend on these types of expression, but plays with expressive styles in unique intervals.
While each work clearly possesses a specific type of expression, the location of that expression’s substance cannot be firmly grasped. What sort of space will this ambiguous and in a sense contour-less creation produce, given that its expression incorporates “walls” that connect artwork and space? We encourage you to come to the venue and experience for yourself the space/walls/interior of Time & Style, and the artistic expression that emerges along with them.
(Planning: Banana Art)
「painting walls」
Putting a painting in a frame involves both the pleasant sensation of fitting something into a mold and a feeling of resistance to confinement. This is because framing influences a work in the same way that a sculpture’s pedestal can cause unease. Changing a digital image into a print is a kind of sacrilege—it’s intentionally printing and putting into a frame a freedom to change size that is unconstrained by materiality. But I prepared a framed digital print, leaning into that pleasant feeling, and an “open” projection work. Then I felt a desire to free the wall, while wondering about the wall itself.
In the exhibition “Color Walls,” the wall is painted one’s favorite color. Thanks to this limitation, which I don’t feel the need for in ordinary exhibits, I regained an awareness of the nature of frameworks. This work is an examination of “displaying artistic creations” in an interior shop.
(Mineo Sakata)
I go home after a meeting held around a lovely table.
For the last several years, I’ve lived in a rental apartment complex in Chiba Prefecture. The wall in front of me, which I’m now looking at absentmindedly; the typical wallpaper that comes with the apartment…for many people, including me, it’s an ordinary space, or should I say room.
And as I think about art and other things, for now I think of white—and I’m annoyed with myself as I can’t possibly get hold of it—and I’m still looking at the wall.
Gray as different measure, or a different measuring gaze.
In the room there’s also my stock of unopened soy milk…that color and others come into view.
And the fishing that refreshes me, and the lakeshore scenery.
(Kai Nakayama)
Profile
Mineo Sakata
Born in Tokyo
Graduated from Tokyo University of the Arts Department of Painting (oil painting major)
Principal exhibitions
Gallery Camellia, Gallery KTO, Monochrome Gallery Rain, 20202, Galerie Ando, Omotesando-Garo, Gallery Out of Place Tokio, Galerie Sol, Time & Style Existence, Gallery Kaku, Zeit-Foto Salon, Gallery Kigoma, etc.
Kai Nakayama
Born in Ibaraki Prefecture
Completed the oil painting major course at Tokyo University of the Arts
Recent exhibitions (as participating artist)
Tokyo University of the Arts Oil Painting Staff Exhibition “News” (Tokyo University of the Arts/Yuga Gallery, rittaikobo), Milestones in time (Nora Hair Salon), Phantom/
Phantasmagoria (Tokyo University of the Arts/The University Art Museum, Chinretsukan Gallery), etc.
Tokyo Midtown Galleria 3F, 9-7-4 Akasaka, Minato-ku, Tokyo, 107-0052 Japan
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