Kazuyuki Takezaki

Kazuyuki Takezaki’s mixed-media drawings and paintings push meaning to the very edges of the visual plane. His diffuse sense of composition results in works consisting of blank space pockmarked with fragmented sketches, odd shapes and scribbles, generally done in faint pencil or pen with some oil overlay. It is almost impossible to read these images as anything coherent: they strip away the meaty center of iconography and stop short of replacing it with any alternate substance.

Takezaki says he attempts to represent the way we perceive things and preserve that immediacy. In any given drawing, scratches of yellow color pencil could be sunlight reflecting off a highway median or a strobe bouncing off a disco ball, but could just as easily be heat rising from concrete or sweat rising from dancers’ bodies, car horns or music. Through this visual synesthesia, these works achieve a kind of transparency. If you don’t look closely, you’ll never see beyond the surface; if you look deeply, you won’t find anything beyond the surface. The works exist as they are. They could be emotions: not the profound, transcendent sublime many people seek in art, but something more practical, the fleeting, day-to-day sensations of joy, happiness, healthiness that often escape recognition, and certainly escape expression.

This poetry is tempered by the deliberate sloppiness of Takezaki’s execution. Takezaki, not a particularly big guy, walks around Tokyo in a pair of beat-up, bulky biker boots. His closet-size studio overflows with half-finished canvases, art supplies, junk, week-old garbage bags, cigarette butts. He reduces the ideal of perfection into the more visceral, perishable concept of “freshness,” working for days to scratch and scuff away the boundary between the artwork and the world around it until he thinks, yeah, this is ok.

The untitled piece from 2007 at Arts Tropical combines ink, color pencil and paint on canvas, stapled onto wood panel left visible as a border along the work’s bottom edge. A bar of blue-black paint goes down one side of the canvas. Somewhere near the center, a malnourished rainbow, in wane rainbow hues, snakes limply by the outline of a revolver and then two starburst-like rings made with furious, tight pen strokes. Along the bottom of the canvas, a finger suggests a proposition. Nearby, completely out of proportion, are a small coffee table, the line of a house roof and the beginning of a leafy tree, identified by faint green washes. From the top of this assemblage, a clump of fishing wire and hooks dangles above a splash of white paint. Written in permanent marker on the exposed wood panel at the bottom, a slogan is the lone and telling hint of self-awareness: “OUR DAYS WITH ROCK!” Placed in the Arts Tropical window display, the work invites an added element of indecipherability and incomprehension. As people look through the window, they might not be close enough to see any detail at all, but this is ok. Transparency is deceptive.

-- Andrew Maerkle New York, May 2007

Kazuyuki Takezaki lives and works in Tokyo, Japan. His work is on view in “Return to Cézanne…” at Collection Lambert en Avignon, France, through May 20, and is included in “Not only A, but also B,” May 12 – June 16 at Transformer Gallery, Washington, DC.

Randeep Kumar

Arts Tropical, 110 Meserole Avenue, Greenpoint, Brooklyn, NY 11222


Randeep Kumar - War Lumber (2003)
April 1, 2007 - April 28, 2007


Randeep Kumar’s photograph of a derelict warehouse in New Orleans is taken from the series God Respects Us When We Work But Loves Us When We Dance, first exhibited at Gallery Rivaa, NY in 2006. The series includes landscapes and portraits - all of which demonstrate both a poetic empathy to geography and place, as well as a distance and remove that might be characterized as benign aloofness.

Specifically, Kumar somehow balances the vast and the local in his photographs. For instance, Kumar’s photographs of Nevada (2003) depict both the surrounding, sublime Las Vegas landscape full of open roads and possibility as well as the interior back streets of Sin City. There are old pick-up trucks parked in front of complexes with copper green paint flaking off the paneled wood houses, seemingly abandoned motel swimming pools, single-wide mobile homes propped up with shoddy lumber, and open compounds set among dusty, horizon-less vistas. Emptied of people, Kumar invites the viewer to look at these places almost as if they were empty shells. Ripe with nostalgia yet undeniably anchored to the culture that inhabits them.

Kumar’s photographs of council estates in Ballymun, Ireland (2003) depict an aspect of Irish culture that is as inspirational as it is controversial. Interested primarily in the functional, yet strangely beautiful architecture, again what is missing from Kumar’s pictures is evidence that anyone lives there. They are entirely un-peopled and the images invite us to consider what these places are, encouraging the viewer to ask questions about the activity the structures contain. For example, Ballymun’s famous pony kids who gallop around the estates wild and unfettered. Shortly after the photographs were made, much of Ballymun has been demolished to make way for new housing. Regeneration initiated by Dublin City Council to address the abject poverty and state alienation that the area has endured since the 1970’s.

Similarly, Kumar’s photographs of New Orleans look at Louisiana’s inherent geography as well as its built environments to reveal its polemics. There are wet, mossy swamps teeming with lush if capricious ecosystems as well as houses that have jungles growing out of their roofs. Perhaps most emblematic of New Orleans inherent contradictions is Piety and Abundance (2003) which depicts a dilapidated house at the crossroads of two streets named: Piety and Abundance.

Kumar’s image of an abandoned warehouse, chosen for the inaugural exhibition of Arts Tropical amply demonstrates the contrary conditions set by Kumar’s photography. That such an abused structure can elicit so much poetry speaks of a certain time and place but also of an intermediate space between the cyclical machinations of destruction and reconstruction.
—Adam E. Mendelsohn New York, April 2007

Randeep Kumar is an artist working in various media. In summer 2007, Kumar is going to India to begin the process of building a renewable energy-powered home, and pursue strategies of escape from the violence generated by the Green Revolution.

Arts Tropical is the storefront window of artist Andrew Guenther’s studio. From April, 2007 Arts Tropical will exhibit one work by one artist per month selected by a guest curator.