Text
Here you can find texts on my artistic practice, along with critiques, reviews, and exhibition essays.
Beginning of a World, When Stories are Born –Gallery b. Tokyo, Tokyo 2016.
Artist Text:
Beginning of a World, When Stories are Born
Since ancient times, people have created folktales, legends, and myths, deepening their understanding of the world around them through these stories.
Confronted with the unknown, they felt both awe and wonder. They recognized the sacred, revered it, and, through the creation of stories, gradually formed images of that which lay beyond their understanding.
Stories are a means of deepening our understanding of what remains unknown. They are also a process through which individuals, communities, and societies establish the foundations upon which they define themselves.
Through stories, we are able to intuitively sense why we exist here and now.
In this sense, it may be said that the world begins with stories.
August 2016
Ryusuke Fukuyama
From the exhibition text for the solo exhibition
Beginning of a World, When Stories Are Born
Prayer for Wreckage of Reveries –Satellite Gallery of Aichi University of the Arts, Aichi 2013.
Review:
Solo Exhibition “Prayer for the Wreckage of Reveries”
Upon entering the gallery, viewers are drawn into a mysterious pictorial space that creates the visual illusion of having wandered into a deep forest of moving images overgrown with black leaves. While it is often said that contemporary painting by younger artists has become increasingly superficial and fragile, there are still occasions when one encounters the excitement of discovering a new talent.
Born in Osaka in 1981, Rufu Fukuyama studied sculpture at Seian University of Art and Design before further refining his practice in painting at the Graduate School of Aichi University of the Arts. Although his two-dimensional works are a relatively recent development, they reveal a consistent concern with the construction of space informed by a sculptural sensibility.
When confronting the question of how to negotiate the boundary between painting and sculpture, the artist turns to the fleeting motif of reverie. Dominating the pictorial field are black floating forms resembling scattered leaves drifting through space.
These forms can appear alternately as faces or as purely compositional arrangements, unsettling the viewer's perception through a trompe-l'œil-like ambiguity. Central to Fukuyama's artistic vision is the presence of what he calls the “Black Sun,” a motif that lies at the foundation of his creative practice. At the threshold where blackness gives rise to an intense sense of life, one can also detect the faint scent of death.
Black functions as a kind of shadow image, interacting with the luminous aura that seems to drift behind it, thereby creating an increasingly layered and complex visual experience.
June 12, 2013
Masato Kurotani
Cultural Affairs Department, Editorial Bureau, Chunichi Shimbun
Works, Kyoto 2011-2013.
Artist Text:
On Prayer for the Wreckage of Reveries
Reveries sometimes come to cover an era, a society, or even one's own life.
But they are never permanent. At some point, in some fleeting instant, they collapse.
What remains is wreckage, slowly fading into history.
I gather those forgotten fragments and offer them a prayer.
Perhaps creation itself is an act of this kind.
May 2013
Ryusuke Fukuyama
Scenery in Dim Light –Tokyo Wander Site Hongo, Tokyo 2012.
Review:
Solo Exhibition “Scenery in Dim Light”
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.
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.
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.
August 2012
Mika Kuraya
Chief Curator, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo
From the exhibition catalogue of *TWS-Emerging 2012
Works, Kyoto 2011-2012.
Artist Text:
On Scenery in Dim Light
Scenery in Dim Light refers to a landscape where light and shadow intermingle, a landscape that exists on the boundary where one thing merges with another.
In myths and folktales, nature, humans, animals, and plants often cross their boundaries, transforming into one another or becoming fused together. Like dreams themselves, they exist as ambiguous images on the threshold between categories, embracing contradiction within their very being.
Such images, reminiscent of myths and folktales, also emerge within Scenery in Dim Light. These landscapes gradually connect with one another, forming a narrative.
Within the dim light, where the way ahead cannot clearly be seen, what kinds of landscapes might we perceive? And what kinds of stories might we discover within them?
These are the questions that this exhibition seeks to explore.
August 2012
Ryusuke Fukuyama
Works, Kyoto 2011-2012.
Artist Text:
Stranded in Infinity Rooms
There are countless rooms within the human mind. These rooms differ in kind and in depth. Some we enter frequently, while others remain almost entirely untouched. Perhaps it is through these differences, through the varying ways we inhabit such rooms, that our minds are shaped, both consciously and unconsciously.
For me, each artwork is like a room within the mind. The images that emerge through a work reveal the existence of rooms I had scarcely noticed in the course of everyday life. Within them reside things that have been shut away, as well as things that have been discarded and forgotten.
I believe these presences are my own shadows.
To recognize the shadows that dwell within these rooms is essential to a deeper understanding of oneself. Light and shadow are inseparable, two sides of the same reality. Perhaps that is why I create works as rooms and then step inside them.
Not every room I encounter will necessarily prove meaningful to me. Even so, I continue my explorations, venturing ever deeper within.
If I can sharpen my awareness toward each image I encounter, then through these works, which may be regarded as a kind of self-portrait, it may be possible to grasp the images that lie in the depths of the human mind, and, in turn, something of the nature of art itself.
March 2011
Ryusuke Fukuyama