In Your Arms I’m Radiant
3 shows, 3 couples, 6 artists and a constellation of intimacies
October 29–December 22, 2022
In the first of three innovative exhibitions featuring pairs of artists whose work is sometimes overtly, sometimes inadvertently linked through the intimacies of living together, Shoshana Wayne Gallery highlights the paper constructions of Rakuko Naito and the paintings of Tadaaki Kuwayama. Naito and Kuwayama’s work will be on view until December 22, 2022, with an opening reception on October 29 from 2 to 5pm.
The auras radiated by Tadaaki Kuwayama’s smooth-surfaced paintings transform rooms and routine experience. They meet the eye with peaceable intensity. They are, perhaps, as much objects as gestures— if there were gestures equivalent to someone extending their mind like a hand. If you look at Kuwayama’s evenly-hued paintings for thirty seconds and think you’ve seen them, let yourself look longer. Look for three minutes and the color begins to adjust— like a body shifting its weight. If you’re standing directly before the painting and you take a step to the left or right, the aluminum strips between panels wink at you. Then lighter swaths of color suggest themselves in what you took, at first glance, to be sustained monochrome; other panels seem to darken ever so slightly. Or is this a trick of the mind or the light as your eyes keep pulling toward the center of the four-panel square, toward the hub, the cynosure? The gravity is strongest there. You feel its pull, its invitation. The subtlety of the painting draws you as a chimney is said to draw, at once into its color field and into yourself.
In another part of the gallery, we find Rakuko Naito’s boxed paper assemblages. One looks like the cross-cut of a hive or a bed of ooliths. Another like white cocktail umbrellas pressed flat. One like a constellation of baby octopus suckers. Another looks like a handmade Japanese go game board. Still another like the silence of a Phillip Glass composition playing in your head. Like and like and like. And yet, Naito’s art is gloriously independent of analogy. There is no nature, no narrative, no figure, no line, no colors, no titles. Her art doesn’t provoke likeness so much as it enacts its own distinct, insistent mode of intoxication. A signal blend of imagination and labor. Naito’s lushly exacting, iterative work is a paean to the hand and eye, and to the joy of repetition. Finger-torn and delicately arranged, her pieces of mulberry-bark paper take on the gorgeous rigor of the Fibonacci number sequence. Pressing outward, toward the edges of the white frames that contain them, Naito’s constructions give no quarter. Because there is no foreground or background, every element is equally essential. Her method, then, involves the highest degree of risk per unit of space. Every aspect is alert, on point.
Read more about the artists here. Naito and Kuwayama live and work in New York City. Naito’s work is in the permanent collections of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Voorlinden Museum, Wassenaar, Netherlands; Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Buenos Aires, Argentina; and The Larry Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, CT.
Kuwayama work is in the permanent collections of Guggenheim Museum, New York City, New York, USA; 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, California; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California; The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan; and Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, Indiana.
