川田 喜久治『Vortex』       Book Design：町口景       発行：赤々舎   Size： H216mm × W154mm   Page：544 pages   Binding：Hardcover   Published in July 2022   ISBN：978-4-86541-149-2	¥ 8,000＋tax  国内送料無料！ 【国内／Domestic Shipping】  お支払い方法は、銀行振込、郵便振替、 クレジットカード支払い、PayPal、PayPay よりお選び頂けます。 【海外／International Shipping】 ＊ Please choose your area from the two below    　　　 Book + Asia shipping ¥10,220 JPY Book + World shipping ¥10,830 JPY

About Book

都市に氾濫する万物をないまぜにしながら螺旋の底へと消え、光る

Vortex 

Kikuji Kawada

On September 5th, 2018, in one of his early Instagram posts, Kikuji Kawada shared a photograph of a poster that read: "Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt."1 This quote, by Kurt Vonnegut, is extracted from his masterpiece Slaughterhouse-Five, praised as "one of the most enduring antiwar novels of all time."2, 3 Vonnegut, an American novelist born of German parents, enlisted in the U.S. Army during World War II, in 1943, when he was 21 years old. Captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge, he was taken as a prisoner of war in Dresden, where he survived the Allied bombing in a meat locker of the slaughterhouse where he was detained. This experience provided the traumatic substance of his novel, but also the somewhat comedic undertone of the style that he came to be known for. His work became an emblem of American post-war counterculture. It seems quite fitting that Kawada would pick Vonnegut's words and make them his own through the prism of social media. He tagged this post with "#kurtvonnegutjr," "#スローターハウス5" and "# なにもかもうつくしく" : "Everything is beautiful." A few hours later, that same day, he posted another photograph: rows of cars in flames in the aftermath of a typhoon, as seen in the news, on a TV screen. The poetic irony of this sequence echoes Vonnegut's quote, and Kawada's entire oeuvre, starting with Chizu (The Map). ［...］

Like Vonnegut, Kawada uses his art to sublimate a pain that is profound, and indescribable. In his photographs, everything is beautiful because it hurt. What remains from insane, natural or manmade destruction, is only made beautiful through the eye of the artist that transcends it. Kawada's more recent work, be it "The Last Cosmology", "Los Caprichos" or his latest photographs, published in this book, seems to be a prolongation of this epiphany: as if he needed to go back to this moment, as if it had become an obsession.

In the history of Japanese photography and in the history of photography at large, Kawada stands out. An iconoclast and a self-admitted contrarian, he offers a vision of the world that is personal, spiritual, and elevated. To photo historian Ryuichi Kaneko, he once jokingly told an anecdote about Yukio Mishima's perplexed reaction to Chizu: "I overheard him asking, 'What kind of 'stains' are these? Stains left by what?' I was a bit contrary back then, you know. I said, 'That's for you to imagine, sir'."6

His work is for us all to imagine: Kawada always steered clear of the literal. This may be in part because a literal narrative form would not allow him to express the weight of his experience. Writing about Belgian photographer Anton Kusters's work on the memory of the concentration camps, photography historian Fred Ritchin explained: "The German novelist W. G. Sebald felt that 'the recent history of his country could not be written about directly, could not be approached head-on, as it were, because the enormity of its horrors paralyzed our ability to think about them morally and rationally,' as Mark O'Connell wrote in the The New Yorker on the tenth anniversary of Sebald's death. 'These horrors had to be approached obliquely.'"7

This seems to be Kawada's approach: an oblique way of telling the story, and blending the genres. A tongue-in-cheek approach to the gravity and the seriousness of our condition -the coping mechanism of the traumatized. His existential irreverence is in no small part what draws us into his universe, and what makes him stand out.

Kawada's work could be defined as layered documentary. He explains: "An image taken of the 'present,' whenever that is, is so strong--vivid in hue, aspect, substance--because it's a document. I seek even now to explore new forms for documentary to take. When you layer things in the way we've been discussing, the layers produce meaning, metaphors emerge as you go deeper into the juxtapositions that arise, and the ways of seeing the image multiply."8［...］

With Covid-19, reality started to look more and more like fiction. The masks that Kawada used in his "Los Caprichos" series, his masterful tribute to Goya's eponymous social fables, made over 40 years ago, took a deeper meaning. On October 16th, 17th, and 18th in 2021, he posted a series of photographs that hinted at his eerie prescience. In a personal essay he wrote in 2016, published in Remote Past a Memoir: 1951-1966, Kawada recalled a traumatic brain surgery: "I was desperate to recollect my memories from a mere few hours ago. Being in this dark place had brought more fear upon me than the thought of brain surgery. After a while my memories came back to me in a trembling surge. Suddenly, I saw an array of photographic negatives floating before my eyes. In pursuing these images where light and darkness were reversed, I had found myself lost and unable to distinguish between past and future..."16

This is the emotion that he masterfully channels and makes visible in his photographs: negative turned positive, positive turned negative. His disturbing and ominous images are a place of excavation, of traumas either lived or foreseen. The world they describe - his world, Tokyo - appears like Dante's Inferno, both flooded and in flames. By combining vivid colors that range from burning flames to ice blue, by playing with contrasts and textures, Kawada generates a series of fantasies, a world that is perpetually at war, but still standing. In that same essay, he writes: "It is by no means an overstatement to say that all I can remember from my memories extending across the distant horizon are places of ruin and chaos... The catastrophe of the 100 Suns and the fear of cesium remain still lurking in our future skies. The conversation between father and daughter continues to be repeated like a spell of sorts, 'You know daddy, the world is going to end tomorrow.' 'What, the world will end tomorrow?'" Looking at his photographs,we don't know if we are witnessing the end or the beginning of the world.17

Kawada's vision is that of a man who has confronted death repeatedly and remained on the side of life. It is at once obscured and illuminated. Vonnegut ended the long letter that detailed his wartime experience as a prisoner by saying: "I've too damned much to say."18 In his work, Kawada, too, grapples with the desire to say it all, through photography. ［...］

After countless hours spent getting lost in Kawada's Instagram stream of consciousness, being all consumed by it, one feels as if they've had a timeless conversation with a man of outstanding depth, soul, and modernity. Bringing the past into the present, in the immense chaos that we are experiencing, his photographs tell us that he is, and that we are, and that the world is, still very much alive. In all the madness to be seen, through all the dark clouds, Kawada shows us that there is still some light.

Extracted from the text 

"Everything was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt On Kikuji Kawada's Illuminating Contemplations"

Pauline Vermare

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Related Exhibiton

川田喜久治 「ロス・カプリチョス 遠近」  会期：2022年6月29日（水）〜8月10日（水） 時間：11:00〜18:00 会場：PGI （東京都港区東麻布2-3-4 TKBビル3F） 定休日：日曜・祝日

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Artist Information 

川田 喜久治 

1933年 茨城県生まれ。 1955年、新潮社に入社。1959年に新潮社を退社しフリーランスとなる。佐藤明、丹野章、東松照明、奈良原一高、細江英公と共に写真エージェンシー「VIVO」 (1959-61年)を設立。
敗戦という歴史の記憶を記号化するメタファーに満ちた作品集『地図』を 1965年に発表し、以来現在に至るまで、常に予兆に満ちた硬質で新しいイメージを表現し続けている。
自身の作品を「時代の中の特徴的なシーンと自分との関係をとらえて表現し、その時の可能な形でまとめ上げ、その積み重ねから一つのスタイルが生まれてくる」と語る。近年はInstagramにて写真への思考を巡らせながら、日々作品をアップロードし続けている。

Kikuji Kawada

Born in Ibaraki, Japan in 1933. He joined Shinchosha in 1955. He became a freelance photographer and co-founded the VIVO collective in 1959 together with Akira Sato, Akira Tanno, Shomei Tomatsu, Ikko Narahara and Eikoh Hosoe.
In 1965 he released The Map, a groundbreaking photobook loaded with postwar political metaphor, and he continues to challenge our intellect with similarly fresh and clairvoyant im- ages to this day. Kawada describes his work as "an expression of a specific scene in time and my relationship to it, framed accordingly, and the style born from the exchange." These days Kawada can be found posting images and photographic musings to his Instagram account.




村岡貴美男『秘儀荘』       Art Direction：須山悠里   Design：島田耕希   編集：功刀知子    協力：如月美術／有限会社木本同人社     発行：赤々舎   Size： H285mm × W210mm    Page：236 pages   Binding：Hardtcover   Published in June 2022   ISBN：978-4-86541-143-0	¥ 8,000＋tax  国内送料無料！ 【国内／Domestic Shipping】  お支払い方法は、銀行振込、郵便振替、 クレジットカード支払い、PayPal、PayPay よりお選び頂けます。 【海外／International Shipping】 ＊ Please choose your area from the two below    　　　 Book + Asia shipping ￥10,920 JPY Book + World shipping ￥12,900 JPY

About Book

秘められた物語や時間の積層。「日本画」を超える日本画家、待望の初作品集。 

Villa of the Mysteries 

Kimio Muraoka

From his long-awaited entrance to the Tokyo University of the Arts to the completion of his PhD, Muraoka pursued his creation and nothing else for nine years. One day during that period he had a shocking encounter - with a photobook of Pompeii, and with the Villa of the Mysteries.

"Today I am aware that my work tends to towards expression in reds, but I was originally fond of blue gray and green gray. After I began to practice Japanese painting and saw mineral pigments, I became moved by shades of red - in particular the bitter and vivid shades of burnt sienna, which has a primitive feel that shakes and excites my heart. It symbolizes earth, blood, life, and fire, as well as a sense of sensuality. The color of the mural in Pompeii was this very burnt sienna shade. The moment I saw that red I was awakened to something new. From that moment on the color has been imprinted deep in my consciousness."

Nine years later, Muraoka actually visited Pompeii.

"The atmosphere inside the villa, with its dim cool air, silent and without tourists, and the world outside it, bathed in strong sunlight, with a chorus of birds, was something I could not receive just from a book. That was when I realized that the Villa of the Mysteries was not just an object of art but an architectural space and a historical ruin. The volcanic ash protected the surface of the mural, strangely concealing its history, and at the same time conveying the accumulation of an overwhelming period of time. I did not understand the content or intentions of what was painted there accurately.

In fact, I don't even know who painted it. I just looked at it and was touched by it. I believe the mural in Pompeii taught me what painting should be, and brought me back to my pure self."

Regardless of place and time, there are many artifacts that inspire Muraoka: Klimt, Romanesque sculpture in Toulouse, La Dame à la licorne ('The Lady and the Uni- corn'), the Bayeux Tapestry, Tatsuo Takayama, the Rimpa school, the statue of Ashura in Kofukuji and so on. However, the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii holds a special place in his heart, and continues to resonate through his work like thoroughbass.[...]

"If people say that what I do is not Japanese painting and therefore I am not a Japanese painting artist, then I am fine with not being one. Finding the landscape I want to see is the most important point, not being a Japanese painting artist. I will not stop creating with my own hands, nor discard painting subjects. It is not that I am trying to express with eccentricity, but that I am finding what I want to see and calculating back to the material I need to express it. That is all I want to do."

Technology progresses inexorably, but will humans entrust everything to it? As things are processed more efficiently and simply, the human hand may at the same time be drawn towards the chaotic, the unreasonable and the mysterious.

For Muraoka, 'questioning' and 'exploring' are probably synonymous. Upon the foundation of the moving moment he experienced in Pompeii, he will continue in his belief that art in its purist sense should stimulate joy and wonder and, transcending genres, he will question the purpose of art and its exploration.

在步入夢寐以求的東京藝術大學後，從本科到博士的九年間，村岡貴美男一

直埋首於創作之中。在這期間，他經歷了一次衝擊性的體驗。那是在書店見到的

一本龐貝古城攝影集，封面上秘儀莊的照片讓他深受震撼。

"雖然現在的作品給人以紅色的印象，但我原本喜歡的其實是灰藍、灰綠這 類色彩。自從開始畫日本畫、接觸到岩彩後，我被紅色系顏料的美深深打動了。 尤其是雅緻、色彩鮮明的赭石色系，有著直擊心靈的原始感，令人心潮澎湃。它 代表了泥土、血液、生命、火，備極絢爛。秘儀莊壁畫的顏色，正是那種赭石。 在看到那種紅褐色的瞬間，我內心中有某種東西覺醒了。自那之後，那個顏色就 深深印刻在了我的深層意識中。"

  九年後，村岡實際造訪了龐貝城。

"昏暗冷徹的空氣，空無遊客的寂靜，外面耀眼的陽光和小鳥的鳴囀，都是 從攝影集中無法感受到的。此时，我第一次体会到秘儀莊壁畫是作为 '建築的一 部分' 的 '遺跡'，而非 '繪畫'。火山灰奇跡般的保護了畫面，將歷史封存，與此 同時，我感受到了撲面而來的層層積累的時間。我無法準確理解畫面的內容和意 圖，也不知道作者是誰。觀看帶給我的只有無限感動。那時，我仿佛從龐貝壁畫 中學到了繪畫的本質，尋回了自己的初心。"

克利姆特、圖盧茲的羅馬式雕塑、《貴婦人與獨角獸》掛毯、《貝葉掛毯》 (也稱《瑪蒂爾達女王掛毯》)、高山辰雄(受到高更影響後的作品)、興福寺的阿修羅像、《蒙娜麗莎》等等，無論古今東西，影響了村岡貴美男的作品不在少數。 但其中，龐貝古城的《秘儀莊》是特別的存在，從早期直至現在，它是貫穿了村岡作品的一抹底色。（中略）

"如果有人認為你的創作不是日本畫，那也不要緊。重要的是尋找到自己想看的風景，是否是日本畫並不重要。我希望堅持親手製作作品，也不想放棄描繪對象。我並非追求奇異的表現，而是為了展現自己想看到的世界，使用任何所必需的素材，這是我想要一直做下去的事。"

科技日新月異，但人類是否應該完全委身於其中?雖然事物愈發合理化、简明化，但同時，人類也仍然會被混沌之物與未解之事、被充滿謎團的世界所吸引。

想必村岡的探求之路也正是如此。從在龐貝秘儀莊獲得的感動出發，相信藝 術擁有能予人喜悅和驚奇的原始力量，今後，村岡貴美男將繼續以跨界的姿態， 孜孜於對藝術的探問和求索。

"問中求道的世界"

 功刀知子(以心傳心 代表)