Satoshi Kojima, Catch Me if You Can (2020), via Bridget Donahue

Painter Satoshi Kojima has returned to Bridget Donahue this month for another exhibition of his strange, ephemeral compositions, a series of surreal, swirling landscapes and figures suspended in a bold, cartoonish world. Welcoming strange engagements with the fabric of the everyday, the artist opens the door on a new way of experiencing reality, twisting urban landscapes and historical constructions into each unique canvases. 

Satoshi Kojima, Parallel Line (2021), via Bridget Donahue

Kojima’s work is fascinating in its ability to build and deconstruct, to create new constructions of the world, using contingent materials in a way that always seems to place the viewer in a space between a complex new totality, and something of the familiar. Having lived abroad in Düsseldorf for over 15 years, the artist’s home in Germany seems to serve as a distinct cornerstone through which dreams and imagined relationships can seep out and populate the world itself.  True, the idea of the dream, of the nighttime reverie and its characters suspended between the logic of the everyday and a world of possibilities, seems to surge from the corners of his works, populating familiar poses and characters with his stark color palette and geometric interventions. Throughout the exhibition, undulating blue-and-white striped bands flow through these scenes to connect isolated figures and landscapes into an integrated experience. The paintings visualize Kojima’s personal sensations and make record of an awareness to a certain impression and the resulting sentiment.

Satoshi Kojima, Akashic Records (2020), via Bridget Donahue

Satoshi Kojima, Akashic Records (Installation View), via Bridget Donahue

These are distinctly compositions that draw on an absence of language, of a world where form itself is familiar, but the imagination and the author that puts its figures into place, is not. Subjectivity and experience are at the root of these works, and create a new set of interactions from which the viewer is invited to experience and enjoy a world born of parts and pieces, captured in motion, and let free to compose themselves anew.

– C. Rhinehart

Read more:
Bridget Donahue: Satoshi Kojima [Exhibition Site]

This entry was posted on Monday, June 7th, 2021 at 12:46 pm and is filed under Art News, Featured Post, Show. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.