Kazuyuki Takezaki, Lingering Landscapes

The ongoing Board/Table paintings see the artist ‘demarcate a top and bottom edge, painting a distinct black and a distinct white horizontal bar across the shorter sides of a small wooden panel; placed between these painted bars is a roughly cut piece of canvas on which has been painted a landscape.’ The process is what a press release calls ‘orchestrated confusion,’ with the scenes, at the same time both vague and legible, painted from memory in the artist’s studio. 

Born in 1976, Kazuyuki Takezaki is a Japanese painter whose layered productions have made their way into galleries and institutions across Japan. Now represented by the Tokyo-based gallery Misako and Rosen, he once ran his own gallery from his apartment/studio space. He has since gone on to develop a probing painting practice that seeks to expand the language of a traditional medium. 

Orange horizons

The 2020 exhibition at Misako and Rosen Miso soup on the board, Orange saw Kazuyuki Takezaki add to this ongoing series, and additionally place the works in dialogue with a new series of paintings, Orange. For the latter, Kazuyuki Takezaki hones in on one particular colour from the landscape palette. Reflecting on the orange of the sunset in Marugame, Kagawa Prefecture, he considers the calming influence it has on his work.  

This specificity of place and imagined and recalled landscapes is a recurrent theme in Kazuyuki Takezaki’s work. In 2017, he collaborated with the artist Yu Nishimura to produce a series of paintings, working jointly on them by mailing them back and forth to one another, with each artist imagining the other’s view from their working space in Shikoku and Kanagawa respectively. The series entitled Twin boat songs was exhibited at Kayokoyuki in 2020.

Kazuyuki Takezaki is represented by Misako and Rosen; read more about his work on their website.