NYAB Event - Akira Matsuda “As a Word”

Akira Matsuda “As a Word”

Caelum Gallery

This event has ended.

Matsuda’s art straddles the disciplines of drawing, collage, painting and sculpture. Unifying them is an uncompromisingly spare and dramatic commitment to black and white, although occasionally he will introduce a nuance of tan in his compositions.

Artists often talk about the ‘speed’ of their drawn lines. Drawn lines convey movement that ranges from slow to fast. Matsuda’s lines are very fast and this speed is contrasted with the ‘gravity’ of intense blackness, done entirely in pencil, like black holes that are pregnant with potential. Another kind of line is engraved into the wood support of the works. Their cast shadows provide an even deeper black than the surface, and they serve as breaks in the rush of movement, as well as defining compositional structures.

Letters are made up of straight and curved lines, and Matsuda’s art is, in a sense, made of deconstructed letters and words, as the exhibition title ‘As a Word…’ implies. Of course the insistent black refers to the black of type and oriental calligraphy. The white areas of the works are like fireworks in a pitch dark sky.

Besides the major works in the show is a diary of one small artwork a day for one hundred and forty nine days that the artist started as a response to the March 11th , 2011 Tsunami in Japan. It is a kind of prayer for the victims. A prayer consists of words. White areas of the works, that range from thin lines to large forms, correspond to the shortness and length of words, as well as to their spoken cadences, that make incursions into a vast universe of silence that is indicted by the surrounding black. Words, according to Matsuda, are windows into the mind, and he invests his compositions with the pictorial equivalent of these windows.

[Image: Akira Matsuda “My diary - 149 days” Chacoal pencil and pencil on ARUCHES paper on board 149@ 7.2 x 7.2in.]