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“Seeing comes before words. […] It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world.”

—Ways of Seeing, John Berger, 1972.

 

The utterly natural human desire to see thing and phenomena

The urge to see, the very natural human desire to comprehend the world by seeing it. The role of an artist is not to newly create an unknown matter that does not exist in the real world, but is rather to “re-” present what has always been right there but fell out of our everyday vision and recognition. Using both visuality and spatiality as its subject, material, and method, the work by Toshihiro Komatsu brings to the fore the principle of visual art—often so too common and basic to the extent that we, viewers become oblivious or misunderstand it. Mettere al mondo il mondo is the title for a series of works by the Italian conceptual artist Alighiero Boetti (1940-1994) in the 1970s. This phrase, bringing the world into the world in English summarizes his consistent attitude in his artistic practice in which Boetti freely and playfully inserted philosophical and political nuances underneath as if to say “I am just pointing out at the things you are not looking.”  Art may just be a reset button when our visions and perceptions become too habitual.

 

Porosity, or the gap between vision and visual perception

Space and vision. To transform a physical space into a two-dimensional image. Komatsu's CT series complicates the flatness of photography and the fictitiousness of represented spatial realism by manipulating its pictorial surface. He introduces various ‘pores’ into the photographic expressions that may be a visual,  physical, or at times  conceptual rendering of reality. Incorporating highly sophisticated mediation with optical and constructive knowledge and technology, Komatsu juxtaposes elements that seemingly diametrically oppositional: personal vs. socio-historical, emotional vs. intellectual, active vs. passive, or systematic vs. poetic. While ubiquitous, the densely layered complex imagery of digital imaging is presented in CT as printed photograph on paper in a traditional picture frame, not on a computer or a large LED screen. The colorful interior walls of a European house are penetrated by (instead of superimposed with) impactful graphic effects of geometric patterns, which result in disrupting the autonomy of the foreground.  By cancelling off the perspective balance of the depicted space with this effect akin to an optical illusion, it confuses the border between reality and fiction. A tension rises between the visual/optical cognition and the habitual imprinting of our eye and mind, which makes us believe “it appears this way, so it should be this way.”

 

SCOPE further accelerates this tension. The SCOPE series, installed on the wall, are objects that could be described as sculptural works.  With its mirror-lined inner structure, the work promotes viewers’ anticipation for unpredictable visions it might offer. SCOPE generates an infinitely fragmented visual experience where reality and illusion are intertwined. Inside the object, geometric forms such as triangles and parallelograms are formed by the reflected mirror surfaces facing each other. Functioning as a reflector that expands and agitates the viewers’ vision into unexpected directions, SCOPE is an optical trap, or a rabbit hole, mounted on the wall.

By confusing the expected results of the act of seeing, the work challenges our visual habitude.

 

"The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.  Each evening we see the sun set.  We know that the earth is turning away from it.  Yet the knowledge ,the explanation never quite fits the sight."   —Ways of Seeing, John Berger, 1972.

 

The urge to see and understand—whether in a physical environment or a realm of consciousness—is a constant human exploration to visually grasp the world in order to position ourselves within. Komatsu's work lies as a very natural extension of the  mechanism for human existence.

 

 Hitomi Iwasaki, Director of Exhibitions/Curator, Queens Museum

2020, New York