Contributed by Michael Brennan / For a few years now I’ve been following Kosuke Kawahara’s art, which I’ve mostly seen in underground spaces such as Brian Leo Projects, Super Dutchess (now closed), and Culture Lab LIC. These presentations were uniformly fine and intriguing but also truncated and segmented, as was Kawahara’s previous on-line exhibition with RAINRAIN, which has now mounted “Exotic Star” – the artist’s and the gallery’s first true solo exhibition, and the gallery’s inaugural show at its new location on the edge of Chinatown. About a dozen paintings, works on paper, and small sculptures populate this rectangular space, occupying about a half-dozen distinctly crafted stations. It’s a revelation.
My first thoughts were of the famous Zen rock garden at temple Ryoanji in Kawahara’s native Kyoto, not because the artist is Japanese but because he’s installed his paintings such that the totality cannot be grasped in one quick scan. Each show within the show commands its own distinct sightlines and is rendered elegant and cohesive by a variety precisely considered devices. They include coupling very large paintings with tiny ones, which Kawahara calls dwarfs; hanging clusters of medium-sized paintings cheek-by-jowl; placing an earth installation on a windowsill; dry-mounting works on paper executed on site directly to the wall; and wheat-pasting offsite guerilla drawings street-side. In this intensely curated context, even some of the gallery’s utility fixtures seem integrated and comically purposeful.
This is an Alfred Eisenstaedt photograph of a stone in the former Ryoanji garden replica that was in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden from 1963 to 1993.
This is the actual Ryoanji dry garden located in Kyoto, Japan
Kawahara is categorically a painter, but the myriad sources that inform his images betray a particular interdisciplinary mindset. Among his subjects are the effects of high radiation exposure (Hiroshima-Fukushima); Yokai; Cerberus, the mythical three-headed hellhound; image modification in censorship; mitate (metaphor) in Japanese gardens; exotic stars; the fairytale The Ugly Duckling; and deep-sea creatures.
I won’t illuminate every ingredient here, but I suspect that all factored into the formation of beguilingly multivalent paintings like Soundless Chamber. It is a stew of inspirations, a near peerless phantasm, comparable to the work of Sigmar Polke in its sheer hallucinatory power. Small wonder that Kawahara is also interested in Yokai, which the Museum of International Folk Art explains is “a catchall Japanese word for ghosts, demons, monsters, shapeshifters, tricksters, and other kinds of supernatural beings and mysterious phenomena. Yokai interact with the human world and spark common notions of frightful things.”
Sigmar Polke, Hallucinogen, 1983
Kawahara’s targeted, nuanced eclecticism is everywhere in evidence. Forever Waiting, with its central gaping grin, recalls the comically grotesque work of Francis Bacon. One key difference is that Kawahara’s black always feels somewhat bacteriological. New Poison is another stunner, featuring a supercharged tennis-ball chartreuse background and a floating, flaming chunk of brain coral. Kawahara typically pivots between figuration and abstraction, allowing neither by itself to fully convey a work’s meaning and thus demanding holistic engagement.
This is the most adventurous painting exhibition I have seen in some time. How often do you get to trail a three-headed hellhound?
“Kosuke Kawahara: Exotic Star,” RAINRAIN, 110 Lafayette Street, Suite 201, New York, NY. Through March 30, 2024.
About the author: Michael Brennan is a Brooklyn-based painter who writes on art.
