Special Exhibition "Idemitsu Art Award Artist Selection 2024"

Last year, I was the judge of the Idemitsu Art Award for the first time, and it made me think again about the diversity of modern two-dimensional and pictorial expression, and the difficulties that come with it. The fresh works of Akamatsu Kana that I saw at this time were filled with the joy of painting, and instantly brought me back to my roots. Colors and shapes dancing on the screen. The paintings are alive. And when I learned that Akamatsu continues to paint while working in agriculture, it all made sense to me. Here, whether it be plants or landscapes, there is a world that both the artist and I, the viewer, face every day and are equally a part of, breathing. The way that she paints them seems simple at first glance, but it freely incorporates the language of paintings from this country and around the world from various eras, and in that sense, it is an expression that can only be made now, in 2024. Perhaps because our daily lives are in the midst of major changes, her recent works are particularly lively and contain a premonition of what is to come. She is one of the artists we cannot take our eyes off of right now.

Otsuki creates paintings by "transmitting." He connects together images he gets from sketching everyday landscapes and copying old paintings, and transfers them to his paintings. When he sketches or copies, he is interested in the incongruity of the subject. Therefore, for him, transposing is not about grasping the subject objectively, but about extracting what he finds interesting subjectively. However, in his case, it seems that the key to him is to express what he did not or could not capture while transposing. For example, the large blank spaces often provided in his works always seem to function as a surface that represents the possibility of another image emerging, in other words, the possibility that he could have drawn something, or the impossibility of not being able to draw something. His paintings are not just a collection of fragments that he personally finds interesting, but rather an attempt to express the sensation of noticing something from a certain scene and having our focus drawn to it.

It is an abstract painting that makes use of the bleeding, blurring, overlapping, and fluidity of acrylic paint. In some cases, concrete natural images such as plants and mountains can be found. It follows the tradition of modernist painting, as seen in the staining of Morris Louis, in that it eliminates the hierarchy of the support and the paint on it, and integrates the canvas and the paint. As a result, the painting is no longer a world beyond the window, completed inside the frame, but rather has a stronger element of being an object, including the wooden frame of the canvas. Therefore, it can easily blend into various environments, such as Japanese-style living spaces. This popness, combined with the bright colors, may have been spoken of negatively in the stoic modernist painting experiments of the 1960s, but in the current state of painting, it can be seen as an attraction.

Matsudaira Rina has continued to create works using techniques and materials from Japanese painting, with the theme of "imagining others."
What is the "other" here? For example, the people depicted in the works. Matsudaira has created many portraits, but he clearly states that they are neither self-portraits nor self-projections. This distance is also connected to the artist's attitude towards Japanese painting. The term "Japanese painting" was created in response to the influence of paintings from China and the Korean peninsula, and the influx of Western paintings during the formation of the nation-state. Matsudaira is aware that he himself, who was educated in Japanese painting, is included in that history. Based on this, he critically considers it from a contemporary perspective, carefully examining the drawing method, subject matter, and imagery. Matsudaira's works also unravel the meshes of a web that has been hidden and made difficult to see. The motif of strings, which he has often used, floats on the surface, taking on an ambiguous existence that seems to connect something to something, decorate it beautifully, and bind it at the same time.