Advancing into the seventh decade of my life, it is natural to look back on what has passed and Horiki has, for forty years, been an ever-present figure. The final reckoning must make space for affinities with people who appear unexpectedly, as though from alchemical reactions.
It shows that affinities are not predetermined and obvious, and existence both strange and surprising, when I think that in my case, my closest affinity after 34 years of teaching Discipline Pittoriche in art schools remains with a teacher of mathematics and physics. I have always had a deep exchange on the level of reasoning and art-making with Horiki, for half a century and until the end!
I don’t remember the details, but at the beginning of the 1970s we both enrolled in painting courses at the Albertina Academy (Horiki with Piero Martina, I with Enrico Paulucci) and we met, probably thanks to the curiosity of Horiki, who came to visit the painting classrooms for my course.
I remember instead, in detail, the lunches of gorgonzola and polenta that took place in Horiki’s house-studio in the attic of Via Po 21.
Why Horiki, who had left Japan to wander in search of an environment conducive to his creativity stopped in Turin, is a question I never dared investigate. His artistic work testifies to his research, and a desire to be close to models where rationality combines with the clearest definition of humanity, human intelligence born and developed in the Greek world (Odysseus), and in the humanist and Renaissance periods (Piero della Francesca). Who knows if Turin, in addition to the Hippdamean scheme of its streets, also had the legacy of Casorati in its favour, and a gathering of thoughtful minds (Gino Gorza and Pino Mantovani above all).
From 2012 his overwhelming consideration of death (which somewhat annoyed and embarrassed friends, if without additional actual superstition) as an uncontrollable phase, alien to a rational mind, combined with the postponements of the book which would have summarized and systematized his figure as an artist, testify to his being irreducibly reasonable. Only after his death did I realize that the book had to come out posthumously, being of no service to the living author.
He certainly, in the encounters he constantly sought, looked for companions, allies and interlocutors in the solitary journey of artistic research, inviting discussion and exchange on their own work. It was a do ut des which was always stimulating and enriching, demonstrating that it is not so much the destination, but the journey which constitutes the essence of the experience or existence to be achieved.
It was thanks to him I was motivated and stimulated to write about my own actions.
The only reference, albeit very watered down and indirect, that I can make to his culture of origin is from 2014, when he asked me to read a book: The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, a novel that had enthused him. Perhaps this text concealed the formula for holding two cultures in balance. I read the novel and came to know it by sharing the parts that most captured me.
Today an extract taken from the first two sections of Chapter 11 could well be the subject of one of the many meetings with Horiki: "... What is the use of Art? To give us the brief but dazzling illusion of the camellia, opening in time an emotional breach that cannot be reduced to animal logic. How is Art born? It is generated by the spirit’s own ability to sculpt the sensory sphere. What does Art do for us? It gives shape and makes our emotions visible and, in so doing, gives them that imprint of eternity that bring all the works that, through a particular form, can embody the universality of human affections...".
Guido Navaretti
