Jacob Hashimoto

The title of Jacob Hashimoto’s new site-specific piece for his solo show in Verona, Never Comes Tomorrow, 2015, seems to allude to the inventive, cyclical nature of his work. Yet while remaining faithful to his signature style, Hashimoto is always able to find a new way of working, without repeating himself. Thus the pieces in this exhibition feel at once recognizable and surprisingly new. The show presents in sum a monumental, immersive installation of suspended wooden cubes, wrought iron, plastic, cardboard, and stickers, and new works from his well-known series of work developed from kites (created with bamboo, Dacron, paper, nylon, acrylic, and pigments), which are inspired by Japanese tradition and are placed in dialogue with some previous works.

If these wall pieces are also influenced by hard-edge California painting, with patterns that bring to mind both the graphic image and the objective nature of the work’s physical presence, the aforementioned large central piece draws inspiration from Sol LeWitt’s cubic modules via a large, irregular grid structure that simultaneously swallows up and expands on its spatial substance. The piece seems to follow an allusive, almost science-fiction impulse that can be found in other works in the show, which are inspired by star systems.

Lightness, immateriality, suspension, a dialectic between reality and artifice, luminosity and transparency: These are all characteristic elements of Hashimoto’s work, seen here in the accumulation of delicate structures, in the multiplication of nearly immaterial grids. Hashimoto’s work is a sort of evocative Minimalism, in the sense that he modulates artificial landscapes that appear to reproduce themselves by themselves, designating horizons of a future that is already present.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.