Review

I understand that Fukuyama's current method emerged from his desire to capture the atmosphere of daybreak: first constructing a multicolored ground and then placing black forms upon it.

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It seems to me that the discovery of this approach has generated effects and lines of thought far more complex than those originally anticipated.

According to the artist, the ground is created without predetermined colors or compositional arrangements. Likewise, the black forms are not conceived as specific shapes in advance, but are gradually placed throughout the canvas as the work develops. Yet within this process, certain formal principles begin to emerge of their own accord. Particular shapes recur repeatedly, symmetrical compositions naturally take form, and the black elements embody an upward movement from bottom to top, much like the growth of plants. Several such laws of form appear, though it is impossible to say from where they arrive.

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What I found here was a curious sense of receptivity: the artist seems to open himself to the arrival of these formal principles and patiently await their emergence. The choice of oil painting as a medium is equally significant. Unlike acrylic paint, which dries quickly and allows little revision, oil paint requires time before its results fully reveal themselves. In doing so, it grants the black forms the slow duration necessary for their gradual becoming.

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August 2012

Mika Kuraya
Chief Curator, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo

From the exhibition catalogue of *TWS-Emerging 2012