2015 Soka Art Center

​ Mitsuhiro Ikeda graduated from Musashino Art University's School of Art and Design. During his student years, he received the silver prize in Ueno Mori Art Museum VOCA Exhibition and the outstanding prize in the New Art Competition of Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art. In addition to his awards, his works have been collected in many places, including Toyota, Dai-ichi Mutual Life Insurance, Nagoya City, UBS Art Bank, Vangi Garden Sculpture Museum and others. He is one of the most prominent new generation artists in Japan's contemporary art.
 
This new series "Portrait of Place" comes from Ikeda's experience of self-imposed exile journeying into the depths of Europe. He meandered between different countries, and finally chose his most familiar creative tool—painting—to execute his diary-style fragmentary stories. His on-foot art is created by transforming a tightly drawn canvas on a wooden frame into a mirror structure and recording in a hand-drawn-style the occasional collision of ideas that occur during the "Portrait of Place" journey. By focusing on a cold plod of wilderness, an abandoned old building, or a fragmentary scrap of wood, he gradually decomposed the sequential order of geometrical points, lines and surfaces.
 
Departing from the look of previous landscape sketches and field collages, "Portrait of Place" conveys the redeployment of ready-made objects or waste materials. Through a structural series of reflection and criticism about material culture, it uses a display of colours, shapes, compositions and other unknown conditions to define a hybrid way of creating art. Ikeda shows a high level of psychological density in the face of real life subject matters. This is because he does not define his creation by material or method. Rather, he allows his work to slowly emit the lonely and quiet emotional tension of the environment in order to bring out a collective consciousness that people can recognize by experience.
 
An innate attention to detail emphasizes an artist's self-developed ability to remodel relationships. Ikeda subverts the categorization of objects dominant in Western art history and uses an attitude of observing still objects to produce the artistic logic of portraiture. This conceptual questioning and challenging subvert the previously sublime or commemorative spiritual symbolism of Western portraiture. He uses cutting to produce "Informal" fragments and linking scenes and objects between the fragments, and refuses to accept the influence of Art History. He does not use themes and does not even require complete reproduction. The picture simultaneously presents the soft-edged landscape outline and the hard-edged thematic line structure and restores the details of the travelled sceneries in a confined screen.
 
Ikeda's works expose the inadequacy of artistic forms, creative effects, methods or mediums. They discard all disguises to reveal how the visual perspective creates the physical facts, thereby enabling the viewer to make direct contact with the theme. Ikeda has said that he wants his work to express the exploratory process of human being's reflexive inner experience as they come face to face with reality and the external world. This process involves an ecosystem established by various rules. In addition to this state of order, it simultaneously contains a state of chaos that is sufficient to annihilate everything else. He seems to be drawn to places endowed with this unique atmosphere. His abundant depiction of abandoned old objects and neglected everyday materials reveals a visual production against a consumerist society. This artistic construction method and format media of raw and rustic materials appears to approximate the concept of “Arte Povera”. This is because they are both non-rational and convention-rejecting artistic standards seeking to redefine the language of art.
 
"Portrait of Place" uses "Art Colonies" as a technique and is at one with a Utopian faith. It crosses the barriers that exist between people and between countries. The footprint of travel becomes the penmanship of creative painting. The different trajectories of drawing become the unique character and nature of the different locations or travelled experiences. Ikeda's selection of materials, creative methods and image sources do not end with the completion of his works. On the contrary, through their experience of mutual organizations, they bequeath a portion of the rights to the audience's taste, thereby expanding their own travel footprints, and continue the track of exploration on the surface of the painting. The accumulated outcome of this process promotes a flexible readable form and constitutes the main significance of the work. A complex pictorial space which has abandoned pen-stroke production, "Portrait of Place" represents the spiritual landscape of our age.

                                                                                                                                                                                  Exhibition Executive  SEAN



池田光弘畢業於武藏野美術大學藝術與設計研究所，在學期間即獲得上野森美術館的VOCA展銀獎、廣島現代美術館-新藝術競賽優賞。除獎項之外，作品亦受多方典藏，如Toyota、日本第一保險公司、UBS藝術銀行、長泉町庭園雕塑美術館等，為日本當代藝術所矚目的新生代藝術家。
 
《場‧肖像》的一系列新作，來自池田光弘深入歐洲自我流放的一段旅行經驗。遊走在不同國家之間，最後選擇以自身最為熟悉的工具─繪畫，實踐如日記般的片段故事。他的行腳創作，是將繃緊於木框上的畫布，擬態成一面鏡子，以繪畫的書寫方式記錄《場‧肖像》旅途間偶然的思想碰撞；掌握生冷的蠻荒之地、遺棄的老舊建物、零碎的廢舊木材，逐步分解幾何從點、線、面連續的順序。
 
作品有別於過去刻畫場域或地景拼貼的樣貌，《場‧肖像》傳遞面對現成物或廢棄物的再運用，通過一系列對物質文明的省思與批判結構中，顯示色彩、形狀以及構圖等未知條件，混雜性地界定藝術創作的方式。在寫實現場的題材畫面前，池田光弘有著極高的心理密度，因為他不由創作的材質及方法來界定觀念，而是讓作品緩緩的滲透出環境寂寞且沉靜的情緒張力，進而擠壓出人們所經驗認知的集體意識。
 
與生俱來對細節的高度關注，強調的是藝術家自發的重塑組裝關係。池田光弘顛覆過去西方藝術史的一種作品門類分科方式，以面對靜物的態度，產出肖像畫的作品邏輯。這個觀念的質疑與挑戰，實則挑起西方肖像畫以往崇高或形式紀念的精神象徵。他剪裁出「不定形」(Informal)片段與片段間連結的景與物，不接受藝術史觀的影響，不用主題、也不需要完全再現；構圖同時呈現軟邊輪廓地景與硬邊線條的主題結構，在閉鎖的畫面中還原旅行現場的景緻。
 
池田光弘的作品揭發藝術形式中，創造效果、手段或媒材的貧乏性，毫不遮掩的批露視覺如何生產製造的物理事實，讓觀者能直接與主題接觸。他談及自己的作品是要表達人面對真實與外在世界間，所反應回內心經驗的這一段探索過程。這個過程包含由不同規則建立起的生態系統，除了秩序之外，也同步包含足以摧毀這一切的混亂。他似乎特別偏好這些氣氛的場域，因為在大量描寫廢棄舊品和被忽視的日常材料中，透露出一種反對消費性社會下的視覺產物。此種以原始而質樸的物質材料，建構藝術方法和形態的媒介，看似貼近貧窮藝術(Arte Povera)的觀念。因為，他們都以非理性、拒絕約定俗成的藝術標準，重新界定藝術的語言。
 
《場‧肖像》是以藝術殖民(Art Colonies)作為手段，與烏托邦信念彼此結合。跨越國與國或人跟人之間的隔閡，旅行就是創造作畫的筆跡，不同的繪畫軌跡，就是不同地點或旅行經驗的特色和性質。池田光弘所選擇的材料、創作方法和圖像來源，並不會隨著作品的完成而停止，它們反而透過這些經驗的相互組織，釋放一部分的權限遺留給觀者自己的品味，藉以擴張自身旅行的軌跡，持續地在繪畫的表面上進行探索；而在這個過程中所累積的結果，同時促成一種有彈性的閱讀形式，便是作品主體意義。放棄由筆觸所製成的複雜繪畫空間─《場‧肖像》，是世代的精神風景。

                                                                                                                                                                                                展覽執行  沈耿立