ARTIST

Shota Hanaki

EXHIBITION

SHOTA HANAKI-BORDER-

Saturday, November 23, 2024 - Friday, December 6, 2024

Shota Hanaki exhibited 24 pieces from his BORDER series in his solo exhibition "BORDER" (SHUMOKU GALLERY Aichi) in 2018. Six years later, he will be holding another exhibition with the same title.

This time, four sets of four works created between 2023 and 2024 are on display in the main exhibition room.

These works are created in such a way that the color combinations of the panels themselves influence each other.

Let's take a look at "border (purple to green)" (2023), a set of four quatrains created according to a certain rule. The above work is made up of a purple panel on the left (let's call it Panel 1), a green panel on the right (Panel 4), and two gray panels in the center (Panels 2 and 3).

The left side of the first panel is painted pure purple, and the right side is painted a mixture of that purple and the green painted on the right side of the fourth panel. Similarly, the right side of the fourth panel is painted pure green, and the left side is painted a mixture of green and the purple from the left side of the first panel.

The unmixed colors painted on both ends of the four-panel work gradually blend to become achromatic as they move toward the second and third panels and center.

This means that only two colors of paint are used in this work.

Furthermore, there is an instruction to leave a gap of at least 400mm in the center of the second and third panels, the same size as the artwork panels. In this 400mm gap, the viewer is to imagine the completely neutral gray artwork, composed of purple and yellow-green, that has not yet been produced.

At the same time, this blank space can be said to be the blank space proposed by Hanaki as the impossibility of showing a perfect middle ground.

The gray, made up of two contrasting colors, has a certain fluctuation, which reinforces the inherent elusiveness of the color, depth, and flatness of the border series. The five works, "border (24-1)" through "border (24-5)," created in 2024, are derivative works of the four-piece series mentioned above.

At first glance, these works appear to be grays of various brightnesses and tones, but the surface is actually covered in gray created by mixing two colors selected after considering color combinations for each work. Here too, the aim is for the flowers and trees to be completely gray, but the grays painted on the left and right are subtly different and do not blend together. Furthermore, in these works, the two colors that make up the gray are painted unmixed on the back of the panel. Naturally, the backs of the works cannot be seen during the exhibition, and viewers can only infer from the gray on the surface, even though they know that the two colors that make up the gray on the surface are contained behind the panel.

In "border (purple to green)," the colors that make up the gray and their variations (gradations) are clearly displayed on each panel, whereas in the works from "border (24-1)" to "border (24-5)," the original colors that make up the gray are not shown, and only the subtle variations in gray are shown on the panels that protrude in the mountain shape that is characteristic of the border series. The former focuses on the relationship between panels and the absence of neutrality, while the latter encompasses and condenses this relationship within a single work, allowing each work to also encourage new thinking.

Since Hanaki released Border in 2016, his works have continued to evolve by adding his own thoughts to the panels without changing their shape or size.

ATSUHIKO SUEMATSU GALLERY November 2024