Erika Verzutti "Chopping Board"

Sheep, 2010, pen and acrylic on board, 21x29cm

This was the artist's first solo exhibition at Misako & Rosen, who showed her last year along with another Brazilian artist—Tiago Carneiro da Cunha. Verzutti's latest work is done in the spirit of inter-media experimentation. She explores familiar surfaces and unfamiliar pigments and, as she put it, "flirt(s) with painting" in her frameless drawings made on wood panels. The result is very interesting, as the works on view appear both spontaneous and carefully executed. There are only two sculptures in the show, just enough to remind of Verzutti's roots in three-dimensional work, yet, her sculpting impulse is amply expressed through gauging and carving of wooden boards. She is sensitive to every little marking in their surface, sometimes drawing our attention to these by outlining them in ink or matt acrylic. And while Verzutti's whimsical animals have little in common with Yukihiro Taguchi's performative installations (see the entry below), both artists seem to be led by the materials they use, capitalizing on the potential of domestic objects, be it discarded furniture or chopping boards purchased in Tokyu Hands.

Gallery αM: "Complex Circuit" Vol. 1. by Yukihiro Taguchi

Contact Zone by Yukihiro Taguchi: installation view, main gallery

Last Saturday Gallery aαM inaugurated the first in the series of six shows united under the name of "Complex Circuit." The first artist is Yukihiro Taguchi, a Geidai graduate based in Berlin. Taguchi describes his work as performative installation. This exhibition consists of an installation of (locally) found objects, a video set up of a stop-frame animation showing the assemblage process, and several projectors that allow to generate shadows that are, perhaps, the main subject of the show. During my visit to the gallery the artist, along with several friends and assistants, held a circle performance, very much in he spirit of Fluxus.

The performative aspect is crucial to the project: Taguchi will keep rearranging the environment for the duration of the show. His other recent work involves experimentation with various materials including a collaborative fabric installation with the fashion designer Vladimir Karaleev (Fabric/k, 2008), a deconstructed performative installation of floor boards fitted in and around a building in Berlin (Moment, 2007), and another one produced out of air ducts (Nest, 2008). I found his approach very "constructivist," it seems to me that Taguchi's work is driven, to a large degree, by materials. When compared with the recent projects from Berlin, this installation strikes as precise and gritty at once reflecting the clash of intricate optics and humble salvaged objects that are made to coexist in the same space.

John Warwicker "for john cage (la mer)—the Floating World"

Installation view, wall drawing , 7-9 April 2010. This drawing is generated by tracing the movement of the visitors during the installation process.

John Warwicker, a known as a typographer/graphic designer is holding his first painting show at the G/P Gallery (NADiff location, 2nd floor). There were six groups of works ranging from a live wall-size drawing he performed during the installation (it transcribed the movement of the people around the gallery), to the digital prints of punctuation marks in Wittgenstein's "Tractus Logico-Philosophicus." Some pieces reference John Cage's "La mer," Kurosawa's and Truffaut's films and actual geographical locations—all are graphic notations of sounds and movement. A beautiful and coherent installation made specifically for this gallery, a "must see," in my my opinion.

Recent Openings: Hiromi Yoshii Gallery

Enlightenment, Last Café, installation shot, image courtesy of Hiromi Yoshii gallery

Last Friday Hiromi Yoshii Gallery inaugurated an interesting group show. Aya Ohki's and Shinya Inoue's powerful and yet visually restrained works make a nice contrast with Enlightenment's Last Café installation (part of his AD 2010 show). The artist's spacial games continue the tradition of Op Art, but present them in the context of a larger installation installation. Of course, the cafe theme is a new twist on a old theme of actual dining tables that relate to the mega-famous painted one on the back wall of Santa Maria delle Grazie refectory in Milan.

The other small room had Shinya Inoue's video installations "Rotating ballpoint pen dance" (2008), "Moving Moon (2010), and "Jupiter, Venus and Crescent (2009).

Recent Openings: Kodama & Nanzuka Underground

Tatjana Doll photographed with

SPEED_Shinkansen Bullet Train 2011

enamel, acrylic,

2m x 30m (10 pieces), 2008

Image courtesy of Nanzuka Underground

The new exhibitions in Kodama Gallery and Nanzuka Underground Gallery (both in the Shirokane Art Complex) serendipitously, address speed and movement, but do so in different ways.

Kodama presents a collection of video/sonic work by a Kyoto-based artist Akira Miyanaga. The main gallery contains an installation in which the two larger walls combine projections from six smaller wall segments. The video appears to be shot from a left-side window of a moving car, and the projection on the large walls in oriented clockwise. This naturally aligned direction is contradicted by the counter-clockwise movement on the smaller walls, so that the overall effect is at once enveloping and disorienting. The viewer can sense the speed, but the reverse movement on the smaller walls suppresses the sensation of movement and the viewer is suspended in the midst of streetlights and neon that illuminate city night. The purposefully exposed projector cords continue the theme of road construction, part of the cityscape in the video.

Akira Miyanaga, "about the lights of land", 2010, 8 channel video projection, 5 minutes loop

One floor above, in the Nanzuka Underground Gallery, the German artist Tatjana Doll is making her Tokyo debut. This show consists of several enamel on canvas paintings and two videos. Doll's two-dimensional works convey the sensation of speed through the combination of large scale and angularity. The cars she paints seem to come alive—the doors of the Lamborgini stretching up and out like giant bat wings. The only painting in the show containing a human figure Rip Stealing Beauty (2009), reflects the movement and the angularity of the car representations that surround it. Doll's nod to Japan's contribution to the discourse of speed is the representation of Shinkansen bullet train shown in the gallery as a video.

Ohad Matalon's Projections

An Unseen Land or It Is All Gone In Reality, 2009-2010, Negative/Positive Still Projection, Dimension: variable

This post has nothing to do with Tokyo, but, on my recent visit to Tel Aviv I saw a very interesting show by the photographer Ohad Matalon and decided to write about it. My review of this show had just come out in Artforum's Critics' Picks. For more of Matalon's work click here.

Bacon Prize 2010 Winner—ART FAIR TOKYO

The winner of the 2010 Bacon Prize is Keisuke Tanaka whose work was on view in the Yamamote Gendai Gallery's booth. Tanaka's mixed media installations (the one in the show was acrylic on camphor tree, lead and natural pigment) appear organic. As is the case with many other artists represented by this gallery, his works inhibit the world brought into being by their creator: at once unique and hermetic.

Recent Openings: Yamamoto Gendai

This was my first encounter with Erina Matsui's whimsical works; her solo show "One-touch Time Machine" is on view at Yamamoto Gendai through May 1. The young artist creates a carnivalesque universe where the lips on a giant face are transforming into slimy mushrooms right before our eyes, heads grow out of the ground, and weird creatures spew out cotton tissues. As I was looking at the mixed media works and paintings I could not help but think about the hermetic quality of the world Matsui depicts. There is nothing extraneous, every bizarre creature, every doll, every mushroom and celestial figure has its proper place. And, at the exhibition opening, amidst all that splendor the artist herself, clad in a big yellow crinolined dress was eagerly posing in front of her works as if shown how to inhabit her fantastical world properly.

Erina MATSUI, No! Never, 2010, H146xW112cm, Oil on canvas, ©Erina MATSUI

Against the prevailing background of artistic gravitas and lofty detachment shared by the majority of interesting art in various Tokyo galleries, Matsui's work initially seems too cute, even old-fashioned, but her sincerity and consistency prove otherwise. She is a storyteller and a good one too.

Art Fair Tokyo vs. KOH-JUTSU

Art Fair Tokyo, Contemporary Art section

The 2010 Art Fair Tokyo was inaugurated last Thursday at the Tokyo International Forum. Most of the exhibitors were located in one of the large halls, with some of the younger galleries and media stalls situated in two separate sections, in the upstairs lobby. The fair covered a whole range of media (modern and contemporary two and three-dimensional works, video, Chinese and Japanese pottery, Nihonga artifacts, ukiyo-e prints, etc.) and time periods (from 12th century onwards). While the bulk of the participants came from Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama and Kyoto, there was also a sprinkling of galleries from places like Canada, China, Germany, Korea, Spain, even Russia. The majority of the booths were fairly conventional, but the upstairs lobby "Projects" section had some very interesting displays: Yokohama's Gallery Simon arranged a dramatically lit space to showcase the works of Kouji Ohno (Storage Element, 2010), Kyoto's Super Window Project TM & Gallery had Morgan Tschiember's installation Solid Geometry (2009). The temporal and geographic diversity of the art fair played both ways: while it was fascinating to see the older paintings and artifacts, the sensory overload made it difficult to appreciate many of the contemporary works.

KOH-JUTSU installation view. Works by Satoshi Uchiumi, Akiko & Masako Takada and Yoshihiko Satoh

The Art Fair Tokyo had closed yesterday, but the other seasonal show, a much smaller one, is still on across town, at Omotesando's Spiral. The KOH-JUTSU exhibition organizer Röntgenwerke AG did not take part in the Art Fair Tokyo. Instead, together with Gallery Koyanagi and Gallery Kogure it put together a selection of works by their artists in the generously-sized first floor gallery of the Spiral Hall. The exhibition is curated by Tsutomu Ikeuchi. Röntgenwerke gallery's choice not to exhibit at this year's Art Fair Tokyo, instead organizing a concurrent show in a venue other than their flagship space in Bakurocho seems like a bit of a rebellion against the necessary uniformity of the large fair. Of the other two participants in the Spiral show Gallery Koyanagi did take part in the Art Fair but had a super-minimal and, perhaps because of that, the most stunning display. I wonder if the single flower sculpture by Yoshihiro Suda was also a way of resisting the store-front model of the Fair.

Yoshihiro Suda at Gallery Koyanagi booth, Tokyo Art Fair

The Koh-Jutsu show will run though this Wednesday, April 7th, admission is free.