堀尾贞治

Japanese artist Sadaharu Horio comes for the first time to Belgium to do a three days performance in the Axel Vervoordt Gallery. The performance will be accompanied by the launch of a monographic book on Sadaharu Horio.

Performances by the artist:
Thursday 27 October from 6-9pm
Friday 28 October from 2-6pm
Saturday 29 October from 2-6pm

Sadaharu Horio (°Kobe, 1939) can be considered as the most important artist of his generation. He joined the Japanese avant-garde group “Gutai” in 1966 and has been expanding on the avant-garde spirit of Gutai with an impressive body of experimental work. He is a pioneer in modern Kobe performance art and his influence on Japan’s contemporary art scene is significant.

Horio’s focus is on praxis. Horio puts together about 100 exhibitions and performances each year, which reinforces the idea that the exhibition is not a special moment for him but rather an extension of his everyday living. As Horio would describe it: “Everything ordinary or unaffected is basically a performance.” In his performances, Horio constantly challenges his audience’s ideas about art, deconstructing the idea of a product-based outcome and enhancing the meaning of critical artistic practice.

Horio’s work seeks to capture the moment and preserve it in time. There is a Japanese expression “Ichi-go-ichi-e” which describes the originality of a single moment. “One encounter. One chance.” Each moment is unique and cannot be copied nor reproduced. Horio creates works of art in a manner that is totally free and without any fear, effacing his ego entirely, like a child

There is the act of coloring objects, which he undertakes every day as an ever-repeating ritual. He plucks various found objects in order to use them as surfaces on which to paint. To avoid making the choice of color himself, he sticks to the sequence of colors in the paint box. He thereby avoids everything that is connected with subjectivity, because what he does could be done just as well by anyone else and could be endlessly continued.

His work is not a matter of aestheticization, or of raising the banal to the level of art. All is in the non-referential action, Atarimae-no-koto (A Matter of Course). The idea of ‘groping’ to find his way through ritualized practice would seem to be something very necessary in today’s artworld, as being opposed to the product-bound. Horio’s unbridled enthusiasm and boundless energy of challenging both audience and art institution is as much inspiring today as when the Gutai group was first founded.