Kazuya Akimoto Art Museum

In the spirit of Christmas I found this great abstract from the Kazuya Akimoto Art Museum.  Great to see something different which also happens to be abstract expressionism.  I also had a look at the blog and there is a section on Christmas.  Very interesting artworks, somewhat morbid but I still enjoyed the creativity.  Check it out for yourselves:

Kazuya Akimoto Art Blog0

“Christmas Dots”

Here is the artist’s statement, deep stuff:

Every art has a kind of language and its logic. In music, it is very clear. Of course, to use this language correctly in artwork doesn’t necessarily mean that the art is superb, or worth appreciating. There are far too many pieces of music which are correct in grammar that cannot attract our aesthetical attention.

  But artwork without including any language is not art, but chaos or only confusion which cannot be appreciated at least by human intellect, because we humanity  get the understanding and the meaning of our surroundings only through a kind of language system. This is also true in the field of visual art. Why some artworks catch our attention dramatically, only to make us get bored soon, and eventually have totally gone without being recorded even in our “oblivion”, not to mention our “memory”, while other artworks don’t attract much attention at first, and only gradually are they appraised by people, but in the long run they achieve eternal fame is because the former appeals only to our senses. These senses cannot retain its contents, because they are lacking in logic, which only can make people carry their sensory contents beyond time and space, and which only language system can provide. In contrast, the latter doesn’t always appeal to our senses at first sight. So many people who don’t understand these aesthetic languages and always believe only what their untrained senses tell them tend to ignore them, or cannot help ignoring them, as  we ignore foreign books written in foreign languages we don’t understand. But, perhaps, they will learn to decipher them intentionally or subconsciously in due course, because our cognitive senses gradually try to interpret the logical side of what we perceive around us, though at first they are dazzled by loud sensory data. When this attempt is successful even if partly, we cannot forget the meaning and the sense of beauty we’ve got with the help of the language system and its logic there used which we have newly acquired, because this logic of the artwork is now stored in our mind. We will come to experience and enjoy the sense (meaning) of beauty always, because they spring from the logic integrated within ourselves, not from the actual artwork. This is why some artworks are immortal, others not.

 

  I am not trying to deny our intuitive senses and feelings. They are not the first answers at the entrance as I said above, but the last answers at the exit. They are the back door –gatekeepers, not the front door. If we encounter what we can’t understand, what we don’t know, we use our feelings. We irresponsibly turn to our five senses. But the senses themselves, suddenly trusted with the serious situation, also cannot be sure of their judgment. They judge reluctantly. This is what we always do in our daily life. But, this usage of senses and feelings is not right, especially in aesthetic appreciation, though this is the way mediocre critics always treat with new art.

  Senses and Feelings have a yearning for norms to apply their intuitive power efficiently and correctly to actual objects. They want logic and they like to be trained by logic. They themselves know well that they can feel and sense the best on that condition. Once they are given and understand the logic of the situation, they turn into determined judges who decide decisively, without any delay, whether the logic is correctly used there and has an effect on our mind as an aesthetic expression, in other words, whether it is beautiful or not. In real artwork languages and logics used there are very complicated and we often cannot explain them at least with words. This is where senses and feelings must be ushered in. In a sense, as contrary to the public belief, feelings on this mission are more intellectual than our intelligence. They can discern what is beautiful in a flash, while our brain would take 100 years and still could not have found any right answers to it until then.

 

  I paint not for representing the outer world or the inner world, by giving free rein to my feelings or by imitating the real world, but for aesthetic languages and logics as I mentioned above. Look at my artworks. They are each different in their styles. To me, styles are something like clothes, and I put them on my work at the last stage, only after have I finished in my mind the essential part of the work. Through artworks, I want to show that logics once established can also be improved, or rather must be, or furthermore must be abandoned to proceed to the next step which it is necessary to take  for the standards of beauty of out time to be pulled up for the future. Seeing this phase in a different point of view, once we recognize a new logic, we are ready to understand and accept the next newer logic, the next beauty. This is an inevitable process for every one of us, and this is why all the people enjoy classics in impressionism, for example,  and at the same time they get bored when they see works newly  painted in that way. They even hate them. We are like children, with a strong will for learning, listening carefully to whatever teachers will say. We all know what we have already learned is important, that we have a deep respect for it and we can go forward only with its help. But we want to learn the more, the more deeply we love the present knowledge we have. What we once acquired is what we need no more, because we find them not outside but inside ourselves. We digested them. We love them because they are already part of ourselves. So if our teacher only repeats what we have already learned without any scheme, we as a child see through him, get irritated, and finally hate him.

  In the realm of beauty also, we cannot and don’t want to go backward again like these curious children. Beauty is beauty so long as it gets over its former beauty and is perpetually being reborn. Modern art is meaningless if it forgets to renew itself and expand and improve logics in art. But people might say not a few contemporary artists are terribly new, because they cannot understand them a bit! You are right. They are hard to understand. They are new in a sense that its freshness is soon to get old and tasteless.  They are con- and temporary- artists! But don’t blame them for their innocent crime.  They don’t know what they are doing. They are like a child who speaks a language whose grammar he or she doesn’t know. Some artists are original and seem to understand the meaning of art. But most of them are also criminals who are in the state of deadly sin. They tend to cling to one single style too often. They paint everyday the same paintings and the same themes.  History repeats itself, Beauty doesn’t. They might once have been great, but once they begin to imitate themselves, what they create becomes not an artwork, but a tiny little history.

  New art can only be possible by those who expand the boundary of  existing logics, and who can destroy them if necessary, of course, with deliberation,  not by those who call themselves artists and scatter colors and forms and their feelings like a three-year-old child.

  As in chemistry certain elements long for the states of noble gases, artists dream of immortality, or they should if they are an artist at all.  Immortality is like an abyss. When ordinary, ineligible artists come nearer to and look deep into it, they are seized with grave fear, turn their faces and run away from it never to return. All they can do is to look down.

  Immortality is also infinity. It can be enjoyed fully only by those artists who can look up and who have the ultimate ability to fly high.

 

  But where are they?…

 

  K.A.