ANOMALY

Toshiyuki Konishi

Solo Exhibition

Internal Criteria

2020.10.24 (Sat) - 11.21 (Sat)

Untitled 2020 ©Toshiyuki Konishi

OPEN: Tue, Wed, Thu and Sat: 12:00 – 18:00 / Fri: 12:00 – 20:00
Closed on Sunday, Monday and National Holiday

*To protect public health against COVID-19, we will shorten the opening hours, and suspend the reception event.

ANOMALY will be holding a solo exhibition titled “Internal Criteria” by Toshiyuki Konishi from Saturday, October 24^th to Saturday, November 21^st, 2020.

Born in 1980, Toshiyuki Konishi has continued to paint people with a distinctive methodology based on resolutely sweeping away details with bold, strong strokes, even while referencing private records such as group photos and snapshots of family and close friends.

Conversations with his grandfather, who was a psychologist, led Konishi to mull over human standards of judgment and human behavior from early childhood. He consequently acquired the point of view needed for taking an objective look at the human species at a young age, and deepened his thought through the act of painting.

The human images Konishi paints on canvas with brush, towels, and fingertips are both symbolic and multi-faceted. The big curling and zigzagging strokes he makes accompanied by the physical traces of the acts of smearing pigment on the canvas and then wiping it away upset the balance between space and body, which intertwine. The paintings show the signs of repeated, meticulous thought.

Konishi’s paper works made by applying oil paints to the smooth surface of coated paper and his charcoal sketches enable him to feel the transmission of strokes directly to the support medium. The absence of battle with “painting-like things” allows the artist to freely summon a narrative that swells with fictionality into the space. These works are introduced here for contrast with the canvas ones, which are highly abstract, and play the supplemental role of widening the scope for viewers to exercise their powers of imagination.

Untitled 2020 ©Toshiyuki Konishi

Konishi says that he paints the gap between reality and allegory. The human figures he renders as distorted vestiges based on memory seem to be opened up to and in rapport with the outer world. It is as if he has captured the instant when the body and consciousness balloon.

Nature’s sudden fury and the spread of Covid-19 have shown all of us just how easily the everyday we thought would go on forever can crumble. We have come to realize all over again that we are living amid a struggle between man-made environments and natural forces that threaten and are capable of destroying them.

Demonstrating extremely high levels of consciousness and sensitivity, Konishi reacts to the ways in which such changes exert an influence on the relationship between the world and our bodies. On the space of canvas, which is free from social media and their glut of images and information, he makes realistic depictions of the changing human mind and body compelled to live with a sense of fragility and uncertainty. By so doing, he produces abstractions of “what is happening now” and prompts us to ponder the future.

I am interested in human behavior and judgment.

I strive to paint something which we presumably know but cannot fathom.

Thought and body forever continue to conflict within physical laws. There is a moment when they thoroughly intertwine, when the familiar landscape is renewed, when something makes sense.

Toshiyuki Konishi

This exhibition will show about 20 oil paintings on canvas and about 20 paper works newly produced by Konishi.

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