KUSHO

Shinichi Maruyamo at Bruce Silverstein Gallery
January 15, 2009 - March 7, 2009


Kusho #9 (2006) Archival pigment print, 27" x 36"

If the recipe gets out, Shinichi Maruyamo's KUSHO (Japanese for 'writing in the sky') at Bruce Silverstein Gallery may very well spark a new wave of techno-harnessing Action Painters. His ingredients are simple: India ink, water, a strobe light, and a high-speed camera. For preparation Maruyamo combines his liquid media using everything from droppers to jets, buckets to balloons, reveling in the unexpected effects of gravity, surface tension, and centrifugal force to momentarily merge Yin and Yang in the air above his head.

While the Abstract Expressionists, according to Harold Rosenberger, saw the canvas as "an arena in which to act", the spotlight of Maruyamo's modern technique falls not so much in the gesture, but in the spiritual gravity of the polished image. Perhaps this is due to the fact that the physical event captured by his strobe light camera at 1/7500 of a second is literally imperceptible to the naked eye. His enthusiasts liken Maruyamo's practices to Buddhist wabi-sabi, or the beauty of impermance. While his photographs--like the historical practice of shodo, Japanese calligraphy--do call to mind the fleeting beauty of daily life, the exploitation of high-speed photography to immortalize an evanescent gesture seems somewhat antithetical, if not outright anachronistic. Just the fact that these photographs hang in a Chelsea gallery where they will be sold in editions to the wealthy upper crust may bear testament to a spiritual conflict of interest.

At any rate, Maruyamo's photographs successfully harness the illusionistic and abstract, exuding a deeply captivating poeticism and transcendental vibe in their arrest of space and time. Whether or not it's Buddhist to capture and covet impossibly transient moments with techno-assisted methods, Maruyamo's photographs are undoubtedly visionary and sublime. One magnified glance at the metaphorical nuances will leave you feeling a little more aware of the invisible forces that suffuse each living moment and remind in many cases, that "art" is what you make of it.