UNTIL SUNDAY 22/1/2023
GENS PUMPS. Of. Burjassot, 54
Vicent Todolí, curator of this exhibition and advisor of the Per Amor al Art collection supported by the Bombas Gens center (it seems that for a short time, according to Culturplaza) He is in love with silence and art that is out of focus. Two characteristics that merge into the work of the Japanese Shigeru Ōnishi woven in the fifties with photographs that, more than snapshots of the moment, They showed multiple moments gathered in a single image. He manipulated them, besides, using brushes and sponges to “paint” the emulsion onto the photographic paper in order to deliberately introduce irregularities during image development. And he used acids to cause intentional discolorations., and hot chemical baths (until 80 degrees) to manipulate the developing process of your prints. The result is a set of dreamlike montages in which female nudes come together., urban landscapes, trees, portraits and indeterminate interiors. Expressive use of photography to bury realism in deliberate imperfections.
Ōnishi tested photography before the arrival of that short-lived but tremendously influential magazine called Provoke (1968) to which Bombas Gens has already dedicated space and attention for having contributed decisively to a radical transformation in photographic language with its motto “are, bure, hips (grain, scanning, blur)”. A predictable attention considering that the institution has one of the most important collections of Japanese photography in private hands outside Japan from the period between 1957 y 1972.
We change gears in the second room of the exhibition. And it is that, despite the fleeting recognition of his photography, at the end of the decade 1950 Ōnishi abandoned it completely to focus on abstract ink painting, through which it came to have a certain resonance within the framework of European informalism. Gens bombs sample, for the first time outside Japan, a wide selection of these large-scale abstract paintings in which color enters. Fruit of a kind of action painting made with ink on Japanese paper arranged in vertical and horizontal format where the bristles of the brush can be seen in thick brush strokes that turn their back on figuration and any visual reference to the real world. In search of meta-infinite allows us to know the photographic and pictorial work of this artist-mathematician who fell into oblivion due to the uniqueness of his artistic language and his difficult assignment to specific movements within the history of avant-garde Japanese photography and painting.. S.M.
