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.