Large tempera and casein collages enriched by weathered tearings or diaphanous rice paper. The beautiful marbleized, stained, veined and grained effects which are reminiscent of bookbinders’ paper are never fortuitous. This is an art measured and noble, a blend of ab­straction and traditional oriental with all its gravity and quietude. Mr. Hori­uchi does not paint directly on his canvas, upon which some forty varieties of rice paper are applied after being dipped, splattered, painted and textured beforehand. He uses largely earth colors bled sometimes with gold, a technique which harkens back to 17th and 18th­-century Japanese screens in inspiration. Two actual screens are part of the exhibition, both of great delicacy and licked with flame. When Horiuchi bursts into a greater range of color, the effect is even more stunning, like a dark sky rent by one of those sunsets impossible to transpose and which, in any but an abstract art, would remain pure kitsch. There are surely landscape memories both of Japan and the Great Northwest secreted in Mr. Horiuchi’s work which is “distillation and inven­tion together,” as he believes art must be.

––Mary Ewalt