Horiki Katsutomi | ANATOMIA DELL'INQUIETUDINE
From 20/02/2017 To 07/05/2017
You want to travel? To travel you simply need to exist. In the train of my body or of my destiny I travel from day to day, as from station to station, leaning out to look at the streets and the squares, at gestures and faces, always the same ad always different as, ultimately, is the way with all landscapes.
——Ferdinando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
The “Plundering” of two masterpieces by Bruce Chatwin and Fernando Pessoa provides the title of the solo show by the Japanese artist Horiki Katsutomi (Tokyo, 1929), with works from the series devoted to Ulysses and The Odyssey.
It comes naturally to think of the mythical character portrayed in Horiki’s artistic research in Dantesque terms, for example, explicated through a boundless thirst for knowledge, the journey as a metaphor for knowledge and the overcoming of the self, an adventurous and provocative dimension. The Foscolian exile. The disquiet of Bruce Chatwin, on the road. The disquiet of Fernando Pessoa (alias Bernardo Soares), that of everyday life: the memory of the dictatorship in Portugal still being fresh.
But in the present day, these themes have taken on very different connotations and have become the mirror of migrations and exiles very different to those of Dante and Foscolo. Expulsion (or self-expulsion) occurs under dictatorial regimes, with that of the Chinese Ai Weiwei being one of the best known; the sea is no longer just a metaphor for knowledge, and neither is the boat that crosses it. The stranger on the beach evokes that of Camus, but does not limit himself to intellectual speculation.
And it is for this reason that the work of Katsutomi is the result of an infinite and atemporal narration but also concrete and contemporary. The artist is an exile, from Japan, which he left in 1969 for Europe. As Gaspare Luigi Marcone writes:”In reality it is the figure of the artist in the absolute sense that becomes Ulysses “In reality it is the figure of the artist in the absolute sense that becomes Ulysses, someone who lives for knowledge. The Japanese master has painted multiple variations on the Ulysses theme using different colours and formats, with a symbolic constant: the hero transforms into the very instrument of his journey. In the upper part of the canvas appears a broad pulviscular stripe, almost a comet travelling through the cosmos, a stripe symbolising the keel of a ship. An “abstract” stripe in the Latin etymology of the term (abstraho, “withdraw”, “extract”), which synthesises the physical object, the ship, with an essential pictorial gesture.”
Katsutomi also approaches the Japanese contemporaneity of Murakami Haruki; as in Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, a novel in which the hero has to discover who Tazaki Tsukuru really is, with the pilgrimage being to the city of his birth (and therefore a return)and above all in search of explanations for the unresolved enigmas of his life.
Horiki’s canvases dedicated to the Homeric hero feature diverse colours and dimensions and a painting that flows, delicate but with the resolute pace of the samurai.
In a selection of works on paper from the 1970s, Katsutomi uses inks to create false fingerprints; here rather than riffing on Piero Manzoni he is investigating the very idea of identity and memory.
The exhibition is composed of a group of around 10 works on canvas and a number on paper from the 1970s; the exposition of the works on paper also represents the public inauguration of a new space for Galleria De Chirico, again within the courtyard of 19 Via della Rocca, which (with the exception of the Horiki exhibition), will be the project room dedicated to emerging artists.