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 David
Risley Gallery is pleased to announce its inaugural exhibition.
Botany, new paintings by Masakatsu Kondo.
July 4 - August 9 2003
Tues - Sat 10.00-6.00
Private view.
Thursday July 3 2003. 6.30-9.00.
Masakatsu
KONDO (b. Nagoya 1962, lives and works in London)
“I am not really
interested in painting reality. Painting has to do something a bit more.
I am interested in the ideal. For instance, when people think of a high
mountain, deep sea, blue sky or whatever, they see an abstract image.
That is what I am painting - the imagined mountain or forest.”
In Masakatsu Kondo’s
large-scale paintings, hyperreal detail in images of snow-covered mountains
and dense forests paradoxically results in remote, ideal landscapes which
exist only as imagined space. As his statement makes clear, this is his
intention. He is not attempting to accurately reproduce the reality of
the natural world. His aim rather is to represent the ‘perfect’
versions of it we form in our minds as our ideals of categories such as
high mountain, barren desert or lush vegetation.
Kondo achieves his results through manipulations of scale and colour involving
magnification or amplification of existing features or elements rather
than outright or wholesale invention. As a consequence, his paintings
seem to exist “in a hinterland between the natural and the artificial,
the representational and the abstract, the broadly traditional and the
utterly contemporary. The world which they depict, while recognisably
an interpretation of our own, is subtly but demonstrably out of step with
observable reality.” (Michael Wilson).
As a result of this,
viewing Kondo’s paintings can be as paradoxical as the spaces he
creates in the images themselves. Feelings of nostalgia and longing induced
by their ethereal perfection are mixed with a sense of unease: the anxiety
of sensing that in reality we will never know the perfect fulfillment
which their ghostly beauty creates and places right in front of us.
David Risley Gallery
Tannery Arts
Brunswick Wharf
55 Laburnum Street
London. E2 8BD.
0044 (0) 20 76134006.
davidrrisley@btconnect.com
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