SHOZO SHIMAMOTO. Painting and perfromance
Galleria il Ponte
15 days left
SHOZO SHIMAMOTO. Painting and perfromance
Galleria il Ponte
15 days left
In occasion of ‘Shozo Shimamoto. Gruppo Gutai - Primo Assalto' curated by Italo Tomassoni and Giuseppe Simone Modeo at Palazzo Bastogi, home of the Regional Council of Tuscany, Galleria Il Ponte is dedicating its next exhibition to a nucleus of recent works by the Japanese artist (Osaka 1928-2013) in collaboration with the Fondazione Morra of Naples.
There is a tendency to think of art as something aesthetically beautiful, the result of delicate work, but that is rather what I would say about the world of craftsmanship. Art, or the artistic gesture, is on the contrary about surprising the viewer.
Having banned the brush, Shozo Shimamoto […] has reached, in his mature works, a sort of aesthetic monotheism […]. Punctiform paths marked by a hypnotic rhythm follow the succession of ring-like forms repeated in sequence until they prefigure the overflow of the markings over the edge… It seems evident that the biological vitalism of the pigmented tissue deposited on the support, guides – as if under the effects of a subliminal electric anxiety – the trend of the swarms of signs […].
Similar, and correlated to the graphism of the mark, is the path of the colour-mark. Colour, for Shimamoto, […] is the means by which the distance between real space and created space is overcome. Colour follows the same kinetic and corporeal scheme as marks, in an economy where the mind governs premeditation, while the body forms a whole with the manifestation of matter. And all this happens as part of an experience that is always unique […]. The colour involves the artist’s emotional core, dragging him away from an imploded and centripetal kinetics towards a burst out and centrifugal overspill […].
The coloured matter melts and blurs, at the mercy of harmonic or dissonant shock waves that open windows onto the world with spectacular deflagrations resolved in the burning moment in which they appear.
- Italo Tomassoni, Shozo Shimamoto. Tra azione e materia, tra Gutai e Art Autre, 2024.
Performance Palazzo Doge Ferretto, Genova, 2008
In 2008, Shimamoto created a 10x10m canvas resulting from the spectacular performance that accompanied the exhibition ‘Shozo Shimamoto Samurai, acrobata dello sguardo: 1950-2008’, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva at the Villa Croce Museum of Contemporary Art in Genoa