pivari exhibitions, Featured, Headline Italy, Palazzo Magnani, Reggio Emilia, Shozo Shimamoto

Shozo Shimamoto at Palazzo Magnani (Reggio Emilia, Italy)

Shozo Shimamoto. Artworks 1950-2011. East and West
Palazzo Magnani
25 september 2011 – 8 january 2012

The exhibition Shozo Shimamoto. Artworks 1950-2011. East and West, promoted by the Fondazione Palazzo Magnani in collaboration with the International Association Shozo Shimamoto – under the patronage of the Consulate General of Japan in Milan and the Japan Cultural Institute in Rome – aims to document the artistic career of the master, from first innovative experiments of the forties and fifties, to the performance of recent years, investigating the notion of physical movement in space in which the artist moves poetically patrolling places. The exhibition is the first and only major retrospective dedicated to Italy Shimamoto and the inauguration in the presence of the curator Achille Bonito Oliva, will be an opportunity for a performance of the Master, Reggio Emilia honor of his presence.

On September 24 the art of Shimamoto literally invade the road. In front of the venue of Palazzo Magnani, the master of the Gutai, from the top of a crane, will launch its colors to surprise and excite us, on the wide surface of a large canvas that will welcome every sign, every color vibrato, which keeps track suggestive gestures in addition to fingerprints. The Master will literally bring the matter (according to the theories of Gutai, avant-garde group of which he was an animator) as the color is alive and may release, through art, their inherent creativity. Nothing is random, in his technique, the shares are subject to a strict order, following a principle combinatorial euphonious, evoking a classical space that defies time and requires long looks to settle the interpretation.

Shozo Shimamoto is co-founder, with Jiro Yoshihara, Gutai movement – Concrete Art Association, founded in 1954 with the intent to renew the tradition of Japanese art (particularly the Zen culture) and to accept and overcome, through a research greater identity, innovation incentives from the West. Gutai in fact means “concrete”: code that wants to be in opposition to abstraction, understood as the mental approach to work and move towards a direct link to the artist and the quality of the material. Since the first works Shimamoto said what will be the leitmotif of all his work: the interaction that binds the one hand, and willingness randomness of matter, the other the performative act of the artist. His “holes” (Hole) are, in fact, the result of an event in which the creative act is closely related to the matter of color and the media. The work is the result and the testimony of a process of relationship between gesture and matter. The color is in fact applied to layers of overlapping sheets of newspaper with a friction that causes it to tear.
The research continues to explore the scope Shimamoto painting through new trials: in 1956 are the Cannon Works, works obtained from the accidental arrangement of color on canvas, fired from a cannon specially constructed by the artist. The assimilation of the exponents of the Gutai and promotion of the Informal Tapie – exposing their webs in Europe and the United States – shifts the focus on the purely pictorial values of paintings by artists of the Gutai and Shimamoto, for which, however, The creative process is essential. The Bottle Crash, for example, are based on a method of operation opened in 1956 on principles similar to those of Cannon Works: the artist favors the action of matter without any preexisting design, making bottles explode on the canvas full of color. After the death of Jiro Yoshihara in 1972, the Gutai group dissolves and its members undertake separate careers. Shimamoto began to get interested in mail art and the creation of a network of artists around the world, in particular by binding to similar actions in the field of Fluxus. In this way, Shimamoto is pursuing a project as it was in the collectivist spirit of the Gutai, and the will of his early years to build a cultural bridge between Europe, USA and Japan.
Since the nineties the technique of the retrieves Shimamoto Bottle Crash, which will keep up to date evolved in the performative character. His most recent production is carried out only during public performances, events in the collective spaces that bring together large-scale trials of the first outdoor displays with the path to artistic research, emotionally involving space, the public and the artistic gesture in a large “theater of the painting”, as defined by Lorenzo Mango, author of a text in the catalog and curator of the same.