1974, tempera on canvas, cm 150x120
My life is my work. What will it be like in that certain moment of probability? Well, I am still here.
This is a testimony to the course of my conversation with myself and how I have been seen by others, as a thank you to those friends who have walked this path alongside me.
“
"
1969 - 1984
IMPRONTE
“Un quadro minimo di Horiki: la materia respira generando solchi e crateri, si contrae o si distende come pelle viva; il colore esiste solo come allusione a spessori differenti, a differenti densità e resistenza della materia; le vibrazioni tonali sono stati transitori, episodi di un tempo che, avverto, non è il “mio tempo”.
1977, tempera and acrylic on canvas, cm 120x240
1975, tempera and acrylic on canvas, cm 54x45
1976, tempera and acrylic on canvas, cm 120x100
1971, oil on canvas, cm 30x20
1984 - 1994
STORIA DELLA VERA CROCE
The work of Horiki Katsutomi (Tokyo, 1929) opens up a wager against the visible. Such is the height of rarefaction and the detachment from any possibility of narration, grasp or formal declension achieved. Indeed, the very nature of telling.
Si avverte nel suo lavoro non la pratica della 'variazione sul tema', ma addirittura la negazione del variare: il permanere identico a se stesso, quella qualità che i filosofi medioevali attribuivano a ciò che è divino”.
What appears is almost the image itself of time, of which Horiki’s paintings restore the aspects of combustion and erosion. And the surface of the picture appears in effect to be weathered by time, by the time of the painting: a minimal wall of tesserae with geometric patterns imbued with mutating colours, painted in the form of a rounded arch or a lowered arch, and squared in the manner of an icon by a neutral frame.
Thus Horiki’s work reveals a double tension, particularly stimulating for the contemporary adventures of art. In the first place, the wholly oriental tendency to synthesise the story of thought and the events of culture in ideographic/symbolic figures, in such a way that the act of becoming history is shown in the apparent a-temporality of an emblematic language. […] while the mimetic will of Western naturalism has created a clear separation between natural and artificial signs, so that when these meet, according to Barthes, an “association of embarrassing signs” is born, or rather of signs whose artificial nature simulates natural signs masking the representative device.
“Before these “little windows waiting to open onto the world” (E. Pontiggia), Horiki has set a kind of grid of signs, an archaic binary code, composed of many small segments repeated ad infinitum, whose contours occasionally fade away like grains of sand blown away by the wind.
1994, oil, acrylic and paper on canvas, cm 105x150
1994, oil, acrylic and paper on canvas, cm 105x150
1993, oil, acrylic and paper on canvas, cm 150x100
1993, oil, acrylic and paper on canvas, cm 150x100
1986, oil, acrylic and paper on canvas, cm 145x100
1987, oil, acrylic and paper on canvas, cm 145x100
1985, tempera on paper, cm 70x50
1990, oil and acrylic on canvas, cm 85x120
1985, oil, acrylic and paper on canvas, cm 95x45
1994, oil, acrylic, paper and cardboard on canvas, cm 100x120
1996, oil, acrylic, paper and cardboard on canvas, cm 100x120
1995 - 2010
ODISSEA
His works, (that is, his work, since Horiki has spent a lifetime on one single work, in the manner said of poets who are always author of a single book), is centred round a colour which gives a sense of immobility: of contemplation that does not deny action but surpasses it. In his works nothing occurs, nothing happens. There is only absolute silence. In short, in his works one sees a kind of pause which becomes light.
One could interpret Horiki’s painting as music which makes itself visible: mental music, subdued, something like a humming chorus since at those points which articulate a space one can sense a faint musicality.
Horiki’s artistic journey tells, fundamentally, about a philosophical exploration. Horiki uses a meaningful imagery, a figurative language.
In his paintings two elements predominate and strike one: colour and luminosity. These two elements are in perfect symbiosis with each other. Neither dominates the other because all is harmonious and balanced.
Horiki, with a hint of irony, uses an unadorned basic image to express lofty concepts. He does not simply reveal his thoughts directly to the onlooker. Rothko described his works as “The simple expression of a complex thought”, a comment which one could well apply to Horiki’s works.
The art of Horiki is a painting of synthesis and concentration, of harmony and silence that is born out of his oriental roots. The background is developed out of infinite chromatic washes, palpitating layers of colour that may unify in red-purple or bronzed tones or the diffused glow of pinkish white. The artist continues to experiment with many chromatic registers in an on-going process of research. Painting becomes an existential necessity.
"Already in Storia della Vera Croce, as more recently for the Odyssey, Horiki summarises an informed subject in a mystical one of images which, perhaps, offers aniconism as a means of recovering the invisible. In this way only – he appears to be telling us – is it possible to prevent the very symbol of the cross being devalued, ceasing to represent an idea of salvation and becoming just an idol".
I cannot say whether Horiki’s painting springs from a “wedding” of wise oriental meditation and western sensibility; whether the “pierfrancescan” light of his paintings from which, as he himself declares, his pictorial research sprang, is perhaps the result of a “wedding” or of a “rediscovery”. Piero della Francesca is his, just as Ulysses is.
Time is suspended in Horiki’s paintings, not through sacred manifestation, but through the overcoming of temporariness. Narration needs neither a before nor an after, it is implicit in the pictorial matter, it is light and colour, and the eternal journey of Ulysses belongs to this, as does the constant repetition of gesture until that enchanted encounter with truth.“.
“Horiki has doubtless succeeded in his work in making a valid interconnection between the Oriental Zen propensity for reducing forms to their essential and the western one which left its mark on the works of what was called minimalist or analytic painting in the sixties and seventies, in other words between a positive philosophic concept of emptiness and absence and one tending towards annulling the image, in terms of concrete adhesion to the primary materiality of the process of creating painting."
"Between sea and sky (or, we could say, between life and death) Odysseus’s voyage proceeds with no reference points, with no certain knowledge, without a compass. The Odyssey Horiki talks of is no longer a book, it is life repeating itself unchanged, in an unaltered performance.
The image is not formed by applying colour, but by removing it. It comes from a light breath of colour, from overlaid glazes: the term “glaze” here does not refer to a technique, but to a metaphysical veil, a veil of light which settles on the canvas.
1999, oil on canvas, cm 130x175
1999-2000, oil and acrylic on canvas, cm 90x130
2001, oil and acrylic on canvas, cm 105x150
2007, oil and acrylic on canvas, cm 70x80
2001-2006, oil and acrylic on canvas, cm 50x60
2008, oil and acrylic on canvas, cm 70x80
1999, oil and acrylic on canvas, cm 110x135
1998, oil and acrylic on canvas, 91x120 cm
2001, oil and acrylic on canvas, cm 90x130
1998, oil and acrylic on canvas, 101x141 cm
1999, oil and acrylic on canvas, 150x100 cm
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