Ryu Takeda’s Painterly Presence at Green Gallery

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Photo Via The Green Gallery - thegreengallery.biz

Ryu Takeda’s “The Sixth Night" at The Green Gallery

Of all the thoughts that keep me up at night, there’s one that inevitably resounds beyond the perimeter of the bedframe and into my day ahead. It’s always creeping around, but it’s hard to describe. It lives as a nagging boogeyman who incessantly questions the nature of presence, distance and technology. This guy haunts me with questions about the limits of simulated life without physical connection. He needles me with thoughts about mediated digital engagement and the potential to lose our collective grip on reality.

The boogeyman was creeping hard last Friday when I visited the Green Gallery. Bad night; poltergeist-ey day. A residual montage of flat, Instagram-friendly paintings pattered irritatingly in my head. But Bogey met his match at Ryu Takeda’s exhibition. He stood down in the face of unequivocal presence and left the building, allowing me to absorb a deep and generous suite of paintings, and one drawing, in the intimate space. Sweet calm that only art can deliver. 

Takeda’s exhibition, entitled “The Sixth Night,” sources Natsume Soseki's novel, Ten Nights' Dreams (Yume Jūya) as a disembarkation point into a journey through pure painterly presence and immediacy—an exercise, and maybe exorcism, in the form of fresh and uncanny pigmented purposefulness. Each of the works in the show builds from one of a series of dreams in the text; however, the works function as opportunities for brushy, improvisatory indulgence rather than narrative clarity.  

Light and Form 

The painting pipe / fava / trough delivers a vertically oriented, chest-sized collection of midnight blue and brown-black flourishes allowing a passageway of auratic light and revealed form to emerge in the upper left. It oozes with sun and soot, conjured forth with the imagination of a universe maker. Describing the painting’s component marks and relationships don’t do the totality of the composition any justice, though Takeda does a funny post-hoc de-abstracting job with his title. The work lives finally as a singularity, whose dreaminess and allusions are suggested rather than transacted, and yet a sense of the magic and mythology of the source literature circulates enigmatically through it all.  

Knowing the story of “The Sixth Night” is helpful but not necessary to appreciate the work in the show. The poem describes an artist on a futile mission to recapture the magic of a legendary ancient Japanese sculptor. This becomes a hallucinogenic metaphor for the cultural dislocation of Takeda’s practice—he’s Japanese—as it is received in an unfamiliar setting. It’s also a testament to the universal potential for the elements of craft and art making that endure across time, space, and culture Adjacent to pipe / fava / trough is another uncut gemstone called bonfire / hypogeum. The brushy tangle of umbered blues and wiped-away negative spaces builds to a private, self-enclosed cosmos. I thought of Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” for a second and considered how the literary dislocation of such a reference embraced either end of the paradox at the heart of Takeda’s work. I would love to hear his thoughts, because origin stories at their core always seem to share elemental themes even as their particulars run wild through cultural and historical circumstances.  

Pigment-Bleeding Contradiction 

A rusty mid-sized painting called pupa / gill / flea on the far wall punctuated my unfolding experience. From arm’s distance it’s a rich and pigment-bleeding contradiction of immediacy and dexterity. Up close, it’s spare enough to make you wonder if the world is really as complex as you’d always imagined. Maybe it all contracts inward as it expands outward. Turtles all the way down. The painting is as dense as a quasar and barely there all at once. But what it is more than anything is totally available to a sensually committed observer, chest-to-chest, human-to-human, in the moment.  

Takeda says of his own work, “I never start with a preliminary sketch or an underdrawing. I don’t set out to depict any specific object; instead I view painting as a form of performance or event…”  

And the spontaneity and freshness are palpable. I left knowing the phantoms would return. They already do. The problems of screens and mediation will persist. I imagined being fine with digital parasites as long as they didn’t kill their hosts. We survive. Tasheda lets us know who’s hosting. His work reminds us that it’s us, and history, and dirt, and dreams at the punchbowl. I thought that as long as I can still fall face first into moments of visceral physical human uncertainty in the shape of searching creations of this sort, that I’ll be safe at night. And that we’ll all be fine as long as make sure the stories we tell remember the dreams that inspired them.  

“The Sixth Night” runs through January 3 at Green Gallery, 1500 N. Farwell Ave.