Jirō Takamatsu

Continuing a cycle of retrospectives featuring Japanese artists who worked in the early 1960s, the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo sheds light on Jirō Takamatsu, drawing on collection pieces as well as rarely seen notebooks and sketches that present his manifold inquiries into space, time, and perspective.

Productively intertwining fragment and totality, the exhibition introduces Takamatsu’s interest in both perception and witnessing, as well as in questioning natural science via phenomenological experiments: In the “Shadow Lab,” the sudden appearance of dark silhouettes in front of different light sources entangles visitors didactically in the experience of their own indexes. Emerging from this work and others, deformation is a leitmotif of Takamatsu’s epistemological mediations on liminal states between absence and being.

Takamatsu’s baffling shadow pieces—acrylic or lacquer life-size paintings of light-blue, anonymous, silhouette-like forms—unfold in repetition, opening up an abyss while they emphasize the loss of the image’s identifiable origins in an increasingly image-saturated, urbanized postwar public sphere. If his complex works were once disregarded as trickery, they are here recognized as attempts to unmask “reality” in its manifold constructions, opening it up to the imaginary. Also, they conceptually anticipate his later pieces that suggest infinite sets of shapes—pieces which aroused the interest of Mono-ha artists. The exhibition not least reappraises his earliest works, whether loose strokes in oil on canvas, pen-on-paper works, or strings and sculptural accumulations of lacquer and wire that expand the notion of the point into space. For Takamatsu, these fundaments of form were tools to measure distance, connectors—elements that free us from the arbitrariness of meaning.