田中竜児

Tanaka’s canvases evoke the primordial, featuring the coagulating masses of mineral pigment and assorted sedimentary materials emerging from darkened backgrounds. The artist did not seek to wholly control his materials, instead allowing the shimmering ores to crack, drip, and transfigure. Displacing earth onto canvas, Tanaka harnessed the power of natural beauty under the mastery of human creativity. In this way, he acted as a mediator between man and nature, constantly renegotiating his personal relationship to his art.

In his later works from the 1980s and 1990s, Tanaka adopted a slightly different style of expression. After thinly coating the entire picture plane with natural mineral pigments fixed with glue, he added obscure forms that looked as if they had been sprayed on, before adding extremely minute scratches on top. While in the 1960s, the works combined the intensity and delicacy of various hues of black, the later works from the late 1970s and 1980s took on a brighter and airy quality through the use of colour, such as shades of blue. In his works from the 1980s and 1990s Tanaka even added glass powder to the pigments to create white blurs. Using feathers and white sand, the works convey various aspects of nature.

Tanaka constantly confronted and experimented natural power, and he seems to have locked horns with human (or his own) power and attempted to express beauty through his work while grappling with nature. The stylistic change signified the development of a distinctive Japanese view of nature from a material, which was intended to express opposing views between Japan and the West, to a subject. This was the last and greatest frontier he reached in his work.

In collaboration with the Estate of Ryuji Tanaka, Axel Vervoordt Gallery represents the late artist and aim to give prominence to his body of work through a series of exhibitions and publications. In 2016, Axel Vervoordt Gallery published the first monograph on Ryuji Tanaka, on the occasion of his first solo exhibition at the gallery in Antwerp (10 March - 30 April 2016), with texts by Alexandre Carel and Koichi Kawasaki. The same year, a second exhibition was held at Axel Vervoordt Gallery Hong Kong (24 August - 4 November 2016). Last year, Axel Vervoordt Gallery and Simon Lee Gallery collaborated to introduce the artist’s legacy in London (23 June - 25 August 2017) and in New York (13 September - 28 October 2017). Via these exhibitions and publication, the gallery intends to contribute to the urgent need of scholarship on the artist and put into focus lesser-known Gutai artists who—though they were introduced to the Western art world through “Gutai: Splendid Playground” the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s seminal 2013 exhibition—had previously been underrecognized.

[1] Alexandre Carel, ‘Material and the Sublime: The Paintings of Ryuji Tanaka’, in RYUJI TANAKA, published by Axel Vervoordt Gallery, 2016: p. 11.

[2] The artist’s words on how to create a new type of nihon-ga. Shoichi Hirai, ‘The Assimilation of Japan and the West: The Artistic View of Ryuji Tanaka’, published by Axel Vervoordt Gallery, 2016: p. 52.