Takashi Fukushima
TAKASHI FUKUSHIMA
Takashi Fukushima
After almost a decade without holding a solo exhibition, Takashi Fukushima returns with a body of works that reaffirms his relevance and uniqueness in the Brazilian contemporary painting scene. It is with enthusiasm and pride that Galeria Frente presents this show, accompanied by this publication, which documents 31 works produced between 2000 and 2025 — a cohesive and mature set that reveals the poetic and formal deepening of a career marked by integrity and creative consistency.
Over more than 50 years, Takashi Fukushima has built a deeply personal aesthetic language, in which Japanese tradition intertwines with contemporary issues in a subtle and silent way. His work is not made of explosive gestures or explicit ruptures, but of conscious choices, internal rhythms, pauses, and continuities. The artist precisely masters the tension between gesture and control, between emptiness and matter, between the vibration of color and the restraint of form.
In this exhibition, we observe a new series of reinterpreted still lifes — inspired by Braque, Morandi, and the artist’s own visual repertoire — where the rigor of composition dialogues with rarefied, at times almost meditative, chromatic lyricism. At the same time, there are paintings in which gestural density asserts itself through stains, layers, and fragmentations that suggest forces in friction: city, time, matter, memory.
The spiritual aspect of his painting manifests itself not as discourse, but as presence. The loaded or empty surfaces, the areas of shadow and light, the almost calligraphic lines, or the silent color fields form a territory where contemplation and restlessness coexist. Fukushima invites us to observe slowly, to suspend time, to inhabit a pictorial space where the visible meets the ineffable.
I thank the artist for the trust and generosity with which he shared this moment with us; the curator Fábio Magalhães, whose sensitive reading helped broaden the reach of this refined work; and our team, for their dedication and care in every stage of the process.
May this exhibition and this book offer the public an experience of reunion with the silent and complex beauty that Takashi Fukushima has been building, with coherence and depth, for decades.
James Acacio Lisboa, director of Galeria Frente
