Tokyo Gendai 2024　Galleries: C10

Takuro Someya Contemporary Art (TSCA) is pleased to present works by Kenjiro Okazaki and Rafaël Rozendaal at Tokyo Gendai 2024. Presenting at Galleries’ sector for this year, TSCA features a large tile work exhibited at “Retrospective Strata”, a large solo exhibition by Kenjiro Okazaki held at Toyota Municipal Museum of Art in 2019, and new sculptures. Rafaël Rozendaal also shows a series of three-meter-high lenticular works from an exhibition “Modern Times in Paris 1925 – Art and Design in the Machine-age’ held at POLA Museum of Art from 2023 until 2024.

Kenjiro Okazaki’s (b. 1955, Tokyo) achievements in painting and sculpture can be more fully understood by examining his wide-ranging activities and body of work as a whole. As an artist, architect, community project leader, critic, and thinker, Okazaki has made many significant and lasting contributions, establishing himself as a master of both the practice and theory of art. At the core of his expansive work is a steadfast artistic philosophy.

The distinctiveness of Okazaki’s artistic practice and thinking is most strikingly manifested in his innovative use of ceramic tiles.

To conceive of a single artwork composed of variously colored titles, each made with different materials and firing processes, transcends the scope of traditional drawing methods.
The process of understanding the individual characteristics of the countless colored tiles and creating a sequence of hues is similar to editing a film or constructing a philosophical argument. Leveraging the unique qualities of each tile (for example, the contrast between transparent and matte colors is key to understanding Okazaki’s paintings), Okazaki constructs the visual surface as if solving a mathematical problem or weaving a story. Like a sequence of scenes in a film or a continuous architectural space, each part of the finished work appears as though an independent color composition or individual painting. Yet as these individual components are integrated into the experience of a continuous and connected whole, the work sparks the viewer’s imagination anew. The process of viewing the work and the process of thinking overlap and become one.

Born in the Netherlands in 1980, Rafaël Rozendaal began presenting works on ‘web pages’ with each of their own domains in 2001. Defining his art as “like a gas or liquid that appears everywhere” by himself, Rozendaal has used the ubiquitous nature of the internet as the basic structure for his works, presenting works in a variety of formats using a wide range of motifs such as from web browsers, food, landscapes and other unique phenomena in the world around us. The variety of his works with their rich colors and freewheeling compositions not only entertain the viewers, but also propose a more universal structure beyond the diversity and individuality of each work due to their structural coherence.

Inquiry: gallery@tsca.jp