Shichinohe Masaru Repulsive Force Series (hexaptych)

signed in English; each titled in Japanese and dated 97-05 on the reverse, framed

Private Asian Collection

Black Angel/Masaru Shichinohe, Ping Art Space, Taipei, Taiwan, 2010, unpaginated

This work is generally in good condition. Please note that it was not examined under ultraviolet light and out of its frame.
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Frozen in Fairy Tales

Shichinohe Masaru

 

A sense of bewilderment greets the viewer when one enters into the world of fantasy and imagination of Shichinohe Masaru’s oeuvre. In his relatively small sized canvases, history and science lie in harmonious unification, as Masaru’s interest in alchemy, cosmology and physics go hand in hand with his equal interest in portraying delicate visual motifs that usually derive from those of classical paintings and works of fiction. Indeed, the multi-faceted inspirations that are backgrounds to his works aid to posit his oeuvre somewhere in between surrealism and the realms of truth, all of which are framed by artful compositions. Sotheby’s is presenting three of his works, entitled Garden (Lot 722),Repulsive Force Series (Lot 723) and Sewing Girl (Lot 724), selected works which are respectively painted in early to most recent years.

 

Shichinohe Masaru, born in 1959, studied in the Musashino Art University College of Art and Design majoring in Architecture, and worked in an architectural firm straight after graduation for three years. When he lost his passion for the industry, he devoted his attention and talent to becoming an illustrator, and published several illustrated books, namely Campanella: the mechanical boy and the magic bugleand Hako-Shonen (Box-Boy). With this initial trigger, his career as a painter slowly took off in the subsequent years, and has not waned in the least. Although his contemporaries and the art market were heavily steeped in the Superflat movement and Japanese manga anime when he first  began his artistic career, Shichinohe was firm in his stance with his realist style that further evolved into surrealism. Much influenced by Inagaki Taruho, a renowned novelist in Japanese literature history, Masaru also stresses the profound significances of machines, science, mysticism and youth in his paintings, which consequently produce a supernatural reality that strike the audience with their refined beauty and detail.

 

Shichinohe Masaru mainly uses acrylic in his paintings, where he applies numerous layers of acrylic varying between transparent and opaque onto the surface of his canvases over time. When these delicate touches of colour are laid down on the canvas, subtle yet dramatic shading is produced within objects and figures he paints. By also using dry brushes, he again applies lighter layers to accentuate detail and add volume to the work. His style is heavily influenced by the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism, as his delicate brushworks and meticulous control over proportion of light creates a whimsical atmosphere in his paintings.

 

Repulsive Force Series (Lot 723), painted in 1997, is considered as part of his earliest painting series. In this sequence of six panels, the bodies of muscular men and angels are painted, the primary motif almost reminiscent of religious masteries produced during the High Renaissance. The Renaissance is regarded as the first enlightened movement within art history, when systematic proportions of the human form first appeared and were precisely studied with mathematical calculations. Simultaneously, countless secondary fields propelled by scientific vision such as astrology emerged as hugely influential in society. The alphabet and numeric values labelled all around the canvas demonstrate his interest in science, while the faces replaced by golden halos resemble the astrological signs. A perfect blending of science and mysticism represented in this series articulates the theme of mankind’s craving for omnipotence, omniscience and power to for control their destinies.

 

Garden and Sewing Girl define more typical, signatory styles Shichinohe pursued in recent years. Masaru’s usual painterly execution contains a fantastical sense akin to a narrative, creating an effect one gets when reading such tales as The Wizard of Oz or Alice in Wonderland. Similar to most of his other paintings of young girls and boys, Shichinohe portrayed a beautiful girl who is using a sewing machine in Sewing Girl (Lot 724). A sense of emptiness yet dominates this small canvas with every aspect seemingly frozen in time and we are plunged into a passive distance. The young girl’s evasive gaze enhances this particular sense of emptiness, as art critic Huang Yaji also noted, “Shichinohe Masaru’s world is filled with an eerie sense of distance” while the iconic characters he creates “never alter, never grow old”, they will “never be able to enter the future.” To such a degree, Shichinohe himself is much interested in this idea of Déjà-vu, where he wanted to reveal the likeliness of reality that creates nostalgia even after many years of creation. He stated his paintings consist of “the aura that belongs to pure substances, the sense of dreamy emptiness, and nostalgia.” For this reason, his paintings of young girls and boys will always be captured in ambiguous, obscure state of space and time, and portrayed as characters that will forever remain in a childish state of existence. In a similar fashion, Garden (Lot 722) also reveals a sense of distance. The empty gazes of animals, situated in an unknown garden, showcases the artist’s surrealistic endeavours and the heavily layered chiaroscuro in the former part of the canvas blocks us from further probes into the artistic realm.

 

These three lots not only show the extensive styles Shichinohe engaged in from his earliest to latest phases, but also demonstrate his outstanding skills in creating his own artistic persona in the contemporary art scene. Since his debut show in the international art market in 2007, he has remained a prolific painter who delivers a strange and whimsical depth to match the poignantly beautiful aesthetics characteristic of his acrylic paintings.