TENKI HIRAMATSU
Slow Living
Artist Reception: July 11th, 6-8 PM
July 11th - August 10th, 2024
While the formal title of Tenki Hiramatsu’s exhibition is “Slow Living,” these new paintings could just as easily be defined as painstaking excavations. On the heels of his Los Angeles show “Breather” at Sebastian Gladstone in May, the artist’s palette has continued to grow increasingly terrestrial: hues of yellow ochre, slate gray, and rich browns. Like foraging for wild clay, his colors are of the earth - buried - something to be dug up or exposed from underground.
Isamu Noguchi talks about how texture should be an element that remains, not something added. This sentiment feels relevant to Hiramatsu’s picture-making. Let’s imagine painting as something closer to a form of archaeology or maybe that’s always been the case with artists using intuition as their primary guide. The figures often emerge in profile (“Student” and “Italian Earth”), unconcerned with being viewed, and even those characters facing outward (“Red Hair” and “Scholar”) have a contemplative quality suggesting an ethereal nature.
Hiramatsu embraces the mythic without resorting to Greek or Roman archetypes. “Winter Light” might be the personification of petrichor in as much as “Cross Road” is simply the ghost of a distant mud slide.
