現代美術　増川寿一

About the work "Island" by Toshikazu Masukawa

This time, Toshikazu Masukawa's work "Island" follows the flow of the work exhibited at the "Sculpture Exhibition of 11㎡ Walls" planned in 2022 at Iriya Gallery (by the way, the work name is also "Island").

By the way, Masukawa's works continued from the first solo exhibition in 1986 to around 1992, when they were three-dimensional works, which were also works as a self-contained structure. This strongly reflects Masukawa's study of sculpture at university in the first place. After that, from 1995 to the present, from works of such a form, materials that do not necessarily have a three-dimensional structure, such as resin and salt, and mediums have been developed while diversifying into images and photographs.

This exhibited work "Island" is an installation work in which the material is a combination of ceramic and wood (processed square lumber). This ceramic is a work "Colony # 5" using the same material.  There is "2021", but here, the aggregate of ceramics is in the form of an annulus. In "Island", the closed annulus is transformed into a form that predicts that the annulus is broken and released and expands as a surface.

By the way, according to my own explanation

The development after the work of Akiyama Gallery in 2008 is as follows.

Temperature (body temperature) → Honeybee (ecology) → Salt (crystal) → Body (entropy)

→ Karyotype (chromosome)

Looking at these changes, the work as an externalization of one's own way of thinking that was once shown in the era of independent three-dimensional works is gradually internalized by materials that are organically connected to one's body. It looks like you have switched the vector to. Of course, both are ultimately presented as physical works, but in recent works the variety of perceptions (hearing, smell, touch, etc.) mobilized in accepting them stands out.

While sculpture as an art was established during the European Renaissance, it is said that in the Greek era, things = objects were given a shape from the outside, and living things including human beings were shaped from the inside. There was recognition. What was derived from this was the recognition that living things are entities with internal shapes, and things are accidental (or contingency = Aristotle) with external shapes. Masukawa's work seems to have unexpectedly shifted from the early things = sculpture to the substance in living things. At the same time, it is also a transition to a composition in which the original sculpture is dismantled and things are attached with organic relationships.

Taro Amano

Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery

Chief Curator