The Maximum Reality of Things

THE MAXIMUM REALITY OF THINGS

This exhibition features 10 master artists and a legend.

The masters are Manabu Mabe, Tomie Ohtake, Yutaka Toyota, Megumi Yuasa, Tikashi Fukushima, Takashi Fukushima, Flavio Shiró, Tomoshige Kusuno, Jorge Mori, and Kazuo Wakabayashi.

The legend is Tsuguharu Foujita. Or, as he preferred in his Western life, Foujita. In this case, we are also faced with a master, but his adventurous life, his travels, and his ability to adapt establish a double sign: that of the master artist and that of the human being in the world.

These artists lived an extraordinary experience. They were formed in an ancient culture where silence is present and language is, itself, a new being in the world. In this culture, art does not seek to convince us of anything: it seeks to offer us a perceptive experience. As a rule, the viewer perceives the moment as passing and fleeting. The sign of a permanent life, for, under similar conditions, the event repeats itself and, finally, within itself, the viewer realizes how this contact has broadened its perception of reality. It is the universe of minimal expression.

And these artists come into contact with solar culture, the Brazilian experience of full light. The world in which creation is the ultimate expression. And, in this contact with the New World, where the future is always present, where time represents the dream of freedom, pleasure, and happiness, these master artists elaborate, each in their own way, a visual dialogue with this space in which time extends into infinity.

Shiró: the portrait of the human being.
Megumi: the stone that dreamed of being cosmos.
Wakabayashi: East and West together.
Mabe: the intimate nature of matter.
Tomoshige: the invention of truth.
Tikashi: the birth of painting.
Mori: painting as perfection.
Tomie: the undulating surfaces of art.
Toyota: the enchantment of invisible spaces.
Takashi: art is the universe.

Foujita traveled to France and was an important figure in the School of Paris. He was a scholar and treated the West with the conceptual refinement of the East. A traveler, he visited Brazil in 1930 and 1931 and was friends with Candido Portinari, Emiliano Di Cavalcanti, and Ismael Nery. He painted, exhibited, and left us, among others, paintings by the Portinari couple and a powerful portrait of the poet Manuel Bandeira. Foujita is a refined artist and a symbol, for his journey is that of the wanderer, the transplanted artist, the innovator, the traveler. His presence is always the enigma of the traveler, of the man in the world.

Jacob Klintowitz, curator