TAB Event - Fumitoshi Eto Exhibition

This event has ended.
At Galerie Omotesando
Media: Painting

This year, with the cooperation of lacquer paint manufacturer Kanpe Hapio, participating artist Fumitoshi Eto has produced a series of self-proclaimed Japanese Pop Art pieces that mirror the original American Pop Art style while maintaining a certain critical distance and suspicion of superficial information and broadcast systems in our information-saturated age.
The lacquer spray that was provided for this exhibition is typically used for graffiti and DIY project and sold in home supply stores for general use. The colors on offer at these stores are generally those considered "popular" by consumers, that allow them to work easily with a uniform surface. While this characteristic of the material masks the skill and level of technique of the individual, it also acts as a faceless, anonymous surface to work with. In this exhibition, Eto has done his best to efface individual difference in these materials while still maintaining authorial intention in the work, choosing colors that reflect and symbolize the culture of large scale consumption and production. At the same time, he also uncovered a different side to these drawing and painting materials and their capacity for expression - such as thickness and uniformity - that is unattainable through oil painting and acrylic tools or airbrushing.
Eto was born and raised in Fujisawa, Shonan, which developed as a satellite commuter town ("bedtown"). The vacant lots he used to play in became gradually covered with buildings and new developments, mostly of detached residences with a garden attached. As a result of the modern, trendy designs of these new residential developments, such towns gradually acquired the appearance of a swathe of uninhabited showroom houses with identical facades, differentiated from each other only by the color of the walls, forming a hollow, inorganic urban structure. By capturing these urban scenes in photos, and then rendering these scenes in lacquer paint, Eto has transcribed this prospect onto a flat pictorial surface that conveys the two-sidedness of these reciprocal landscapes. By producing these works that fuse natural landscape and the effects of modernity, Eto poses fundamental questions and returns to the roots of the individual's relationship to society and vice versa.

[Image: "Model House Fujisawa" (2007), panel and canvas lacquer, 56.0×80.0cm]

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