Motohiro Takeda’s artworks create an ambient milieu of quiet dominance and gentle radiance, graced by delicate remnants of botanical matter and nostalgic objects. This “garden of time,” as the artist calls it, acquires its form through found wood, stones, and flowers in nature, which are given new lives through shou sugi ban, or yakisugi, a traditional Japanese wood-burning technique. His latest solo presentation at Alison Bradley Projects provides a comprehensive survey of his recent trajectory.
Through poetically composed topographies, Takeda creates meditative landscapes of control and chaos that gesture at a proto-resolution towards infinity, permeated by a vital force reified in a radically tangible material rhapsody. This force is the non-material medium of the space he choreographs, an energy that arises from the resonance between the artist and nature in all its vast meanings.
Always hinting at an intrinsic mortality, the works he creates evoke a rebirth of nature and time. In his “Hanaikada (Flower Boat)” series, Takeda cast freshly-picked sakura, daisies, and hydrangeas into concrete, allowing their vibrant colors to slowly fade over time, transforming them into timepieces that record the process of decay. The centerpiece, Untitled (Spear) (2024), features a cast-mold concrete tree trunk protruding out of a moss-covered stone. The calligraphic form stands as the afterlife of the original tree—a doppelgänger that conjures an imaginary of permanence.
With the passing of time, a subtle disquiet emerges, melting into a reverie of precarity. Untitled (Sphere) (2023) sits off-center on logs of slanted edges born out of natural ruination in a precarious balance. The wood fragments on the floor, meticulously lined up into a near-perfect pathway, also border on imminent destruction—you almost hear the crisp sound of wood being crushed into pieces. The space is infused with a potential energy for demise in a eulogistic light, yet immortality is realized through sculptural reincarnation. The artist speaks of this push and pull as “a dance,” which is central to his practice, especially since the “incident.”
What he is still seeking the right language for is his recent near-death experience after contracting a rare, life-threatening infection last year. He refers to it as the “incident,” which put him in an extended period of unconsciousness with fading control over parts of his body. This episode, which coincided with the artist turning forty, triggered a profound shift in his psyche. The title piece of the show was born out of intense contemplation on death. Accompanied by Keith Jarrett’s melancholic jazz, Takeda set out to channel the energy of the deceased as if experiencing his own death, and translated it into an abstract imagery with his signature charcoal rubbing. A waterfall, a mountain range, a landscape of trees—associations have been made to try to capture his fluid surfaces, which resist definition and open toward the unknown, enriched by the very absence of emotional or symbolic designation.
The new series he is working on involves reconstructing his body parts with molds, documenting the slow process of healing with his own damaged flesh and bones. The concrete hand, Nights in April (2024), is an earlier work in this series. Studded with petals, the hand is at once romantically exuberant and distressingly masochistic, seducing you to appreciate the allure of brokenness and the fleeting nature of life. A post-apocalyptic soul himself, Takeda is one with his work.
Gao Yuan is a contributor to the Brooklyn Rail.
November 15, 2024
