Syotatsu & Kansai Noguchi Syotatsu & Kansai Noguchi
Syotatsu and Kansai Noguchi reach past the act of artistic creation itself, each in his own way opening a dialogue with nature and with traditional artistic practices. In their work, permanence shows itself both in how the pieces are conceived – through physical and spiritual contact with the surroundings – and in the pursuit of a lasting presence, inscribed in the materiality of what they make even as it reinvents allegories. The exhibition presents ceramics by Kansai Noguchi and paintings by Syotatsu that bring this reflection to the Barra Funda space in series made from a range of natural materials, most of them from the places where the artists live.
Syotatsu (b. 1982, Wakayama, Japan) began his artistic career at nineteen on the streets of Kyoto, drawing nigaoe portraits – caricatures that set out to “capture” the most striking expression of the human face. After eighteen years in the trade, he returned to his hometown, where a dream about a lord of the mountain inspired him to begin the kind of painting he practices today. Reconnecting with the landscape and spirituality of Wakayama, he continued developing the figures that still populate his work – the product of what he observes, feels, and hears in the natural world around him.
His paintings, some of them more than three meters wide, like Rondo (2026) and IRODORIYAMA (2026), are made using natural materials, including earth gathered nearby, natural materials such as soot and animal glue, brass powder, and traditional Japanese paint. These are applied to antique supports such as wooden panels, an Indian window, a French mirror, and a folding screen. Unbeholden to the support, Syotatsu reserves the right to pare his pictorial elements down to a few forms recognizable throughout his work, setting out a dictionary of lines, curves, and contours that allude to an expressive cosmology of the world and its stories.
“These paintings hold within them the things I have seen and felt in the places where we live – the skies I have gazed upon, the earth beneath my feet each day, the passing of time,” says Syotatsu. In All that lives (2025), an antique folding screen 3.5 meters wide teems with beings that summon the magical, the mystical, and the spiritual, and at the same time bear a likeness to the real, in an endless wealth of detail.
Kansai Noguchi (b. 1982, Fukuoka, Japan) was working in music in the United States when he came across the work of Isamu Noguchi, the Japanese American sculptor and designer, at the Noguchi Museum in New York. The encounter marked a decisive turn for Kansai, who went on to devote himself to ceramics. He began with modeling lessons from a sculptor, then gradually taught himself to bring organic materials into his work. From that point on, his practice became empirical, in the sense that it embraced the irregularities and texture of the material.
Steeped in Greek mythology, in the Jomon pottery tradition (the ancient ceramics of the Jomon period, which began around 13,000 BCE), and in the cultures and landscapes he encountered on his travels through Japan, Noguchi has made vases, plates, and plaques for the exhibition. “When I make my work, I am always aware of pushing beyond my comfort zone. I believe that by stepping into unknown territory, I can find things that are truly unknown to me.”
The pieces fall into series that build on his earlier practice while taking on new challenges of form and expression. In NEO JOMON Yakishime (2026), the artist returns to a previous series of vases referencing Jomon forms and the yakishime technique – a Japanese tradition in which pieces are fired at high temperatures, with no glaze or varnish. The series gains new elements: the popular culture, architecture, and colors Kansai found on his travels through Southeast Asia.
APOLLO (2026) carries mythological overtones, inspired by Apollo, the god of the sun, who drives his chariot across the sky each day, carrying the sun to its destination. To build the series, the artist abstracted the forms of the horses pulling the chariot, arriving at vases that defy balance and form. It is from this combination of ancient and primordial techniques that he re-creates the myth, through abstraction and the halting repetition of patterns over the ceramic’s uneven surface. As in the myth, Apollo’s story comes into view, and with it the very stumbles of his eternal task of reinventing light – constant, and every bit as revealing.
In bringing different materialities into their work, the artists express their relationship with nature and with time, cutting against the grain of an accelerated, mechanized logic. Their ties to tradition, their rapport with everything around them, and their reflections on different forms of divinity suggest a connection with the whole – a nature that excludes nothing and takes in life in all its manifestations.