Keisuke Katsuki

www.keisuke-katsuki.com

It has been a while since shining displays became a part of our life.   They, our computer displays, are working night and day as personal information media but are they functioning as “painting of our own time”?  Paintings have once been a communication tool or at least could have function as such.　After recent times, however, it is said that paintings have returned to its original nature, a pure visual art.  Now, it is obvious that even those “pure visual art” are on our display as an image.  For such digital images, display plays the role of support to the image as canvas does to the conventional painting and its interface makes the visual environment of each person.  Display keeps throwing superficial and insubstantial images to us all the time, which sometimes makes the image look transparent.  Display is considered as transparent media because the receivers are not aware of the structure of being transparent(pixel itself).  Once receivers recognize the display as material, it looks opaque substantial material.  In other words, all media which manages reproductive image can’t be completely transparent because of the existence of substantial material.

In case of the painting of today, supporting media such as wood frame, canvas and colours are recognized as opaque substantial material that naturally exists.  By the existence of such supporting media, the characteristics of the painting is exposed just as the image of the painting is exposed and the subject of the painting disappears in an instant, which makes us amazed and bewildered. Interestingly, that feeling of amazement and bewilderment is exactly of the same quality with the feeling we get when we watch the surface of an old low-res display up close.  Our perception is swaying in the middle of two directly-opposed ideas such as appearance and existence.  The only way to be involved with such appearance and existence is by watching them.  Lights are always there. The computer display illumines on its own.  On the other hand, the surface of paintings is filled with light by different means.

So, what does it mean to draw or paint the light?  In my “Pixel Painting” series, I painted the enlarged low-res image on display on canvas.  By doing that, three lights or colours, red, blue and green, appear, which we can’t see in our normal life.  With this vague light, undefined abstract image appears and changes the position of itself to something dynamic.  All images including painting are wandering about the middle of visible and invisible, which our eyes can never fully catch.  We have to remember that everything we see in our everyday life is in that nature.   I have to repeat; “Lights exist all the time.”

Exhibiting at Griffin Gallery in Two Truths, May-June 2015

BORN

1991, Fukuoka Pref, Japan

EDUCATION

2014:   Graduated from Tokyo Zoukei University, Painting Dept.

2015:   Tokyo Zoukei University Graduate school, majoring in Fine Arts

(Last updated 14.05.2015)

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