It’s not often that you get a sense of the artist’s self in an exhibition of geometric abstraction paintings. This, after all, is a genre that epitomises our experience of the city and it’s hard to push its boundaries.
Converging lines, intersecting planes and tinted surfaces are not what you’d call personal. Masato Takasaka claims to have been making the same structural arrangements of triangles since 1994 when he was a teenager.
The exhibition ALMOST ALMOST EVERYTHING ALL AT ONCE, TWICE, THREE TIMES (IN FOUR PARTS…) RETURNAL RETURN REDUX at Fiona and Sidney Myer Gallery contains 21 riffs on a theme. Untitled #23 Garage Days Revisited, which looks similar in surface, colour and shape to the other works is dated 2024.
Untitled #23 might be the most recent but it has had two iterations, the first in 1994, the date of its inception. Others have had three.
“There’s nothing wrong with repeating yourself,” said one of the show’s admirers, a student at the Victorian College of the Arts. “Staff tell us to break the rules by example,” she said.
Takasaka likens his work to that of a session musician. As a teenager he was a thrash rock musician, playing the guitar obsessively. A review from 2009, blown up on the gallery wall, puts it into perspective.
“The practice of already-made and geometric abstraction may be at odds with rock guitar wizardry,” writes Damiano Bertoli.
Session guys excel at all genres, he says. They are forever playing others’ music. He says they are “shape shifters” and this poetic is the one that makes the artist present in the exhibition.
Takasaka does not claim to be original. In fact he takes delight in playing with his references, in a tongue-in-cheek installation. Picasso gets a mention as do the books Cubism in Australia and The Art of Laziness which he connects with black lines.
Modesty suits this artist. He’s not pretending to be any great thinker. “In it For the Money” is a tag line on his t-shirt in an irreverent 1998 photographic self-portrait. Most of the works in the exhibition come from private collections so this is a formula that seems to have worked.
Close-up the triangles appears to form narrative chains with the black doing the framing. Boldness of vision is the aim rather than perfection. All patterns converge on the centre as if a centrifugal force allows a liking for lilac while the black does the work.
Takasaka uses the same colours in 21 paintings, a practice he calls a structural jam, a derivative, says another commentator, of the Duchampian readymade object in that he plunders his own museum of work.
ALMOST ALMOST EVERYTHING ALL AT ONCE, TWICE, THREE TIMES (IN FOUR PARTS…) RETURNAL RETURN REDUX is just part of the title for the exhibition, which includes works from the permanent collection and selected loans from the EVERYTHING ALWAYS ALREADY-MADE STUDIO MASATOTECTURES MUSEUM OF FOUND REFRACTIONS.
This guy knows how to have fun with words, ideas and masking tape and the exhibition is an inspiring post-cubist, post-punk riff on a tried genre.
Masato Takasaka
Fiona and Sidney Myer Gallery, 40 Dodds Street, Southbank
Exhibition continues to 10 August 2024
Free entry
For more information, visit: www.finearts-music.unimelb.edu.au for details.
Image: Masato Takasaka, ALMOST ALMOST EVERYTHING ALL AT ONCE, TWICE, THREE TIMES (IN FOUR PARTS…) RETURNAL RETURN REDUX*works from the permanent collection and selected loans from the EVERYTHING ALWAYS ALREADY-MADE STUDIO MASATOTECTURES MUSEUM OF FOUND REFRACTIONS (1979-2022), installation view, Conners Conners Gallery, Melbourne, dimensions variable – photo by Christian Capurro
Words: Rhonda Dredge