Kenjiro Okazaki “TOPICA PICTUS Kozaka-honmachi”
The solo exhibition “Kenjiro Okazaki — Reconstruction of Vision,” held at the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art from November 2019 through the end of February 2020, is still fresh in memory. Now the special exhibition “Kenjiro Okazaki: TOPICA PICTUS Kozaka-honmachi” has opened.
As if timed to coincide with the end of that solo exhibition, the world was subsequently plunged into a crisis and anxiety of an unimaginable magnitude. Unable even to go outside, Kenjiro Okazaki shut himself in his studio and, from March through June, intensively produced a painting series of over 150 works titled “TOPICA PICTUS.”
“Just as there are many places in the world, and countless topics (topica, in Aristotle’s sense) worth thinking about, each painting is made in response to its own unique problem, its own particular place.” That is what “makes each painting singular, and it is the network of these countless places that weaves the world together.”
This painting series “TOPICA PICTUS” is being shown in a distributed manner, split across the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art and several other venues at staggered times. (Its full scope, as a placeless place, is compiled in the art book “TOPICA PICTUS,” which is the only setting in which the whole can be seen.)
Each individual painting is a painting unto itself, and by holding fast to that fact, while being here in this place, it also harbors a special place that opens onto another place. (In the essays distributed at the venue, written in response to each individual work, you can trace the flow of the artist’s own thinking through the creative process.)
Just as countless places weave the world together, the paintings displayed at each location bring forth their own place, giving rise to a world through networks. We invite you to encounter each of these special places, one by one, here at the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art.
*All images courtesy of Toyota Municipal Museum of Art.
