Five Days Left — A Conviction About Decoration, Placed One Dot at a Time

Five days remain in Tanaka Raou's solo exhibition “-Sen-,” which closes on Saturday, May 9th.

The work introduced here, Burst of Blue, conveys the artist's guiding philosophy for this show more directly than any other piece on view.

Countless dots of color spread across the panel. At first glance they look like traces of paint splattered with force, but look closer and you'll see that every one of them was placed, individually, by the tip of a brush. Not accidental spatter, but deliberate repetition. The dots follow the paint's own natural flow to form a pattern, and that pattern quietly governs the harmony of the entire composition.

What Tanaka Raou consciously pursued in this work was a decision to lower the weight given to representation and raise the purity of decorative pattern. He possesses formidable representational skill, honed to the point of winning a world championship in caricature — and yet he deliberately steps away from it here. Just as a column's carving, structurally unnecessary, can transform architecture into art, decoration itself may be the purest realm of artistic expression — a conviction condensed into this composition of blue, built around bold expanses of empty space.

Panel, acrylic. 10P (530 × 410 mm). Made in 2026. ¥330,000 (tax included).

Solo exhibition “Tanaka Raou -Sen-”
Dates: April 25 – May 9 (Sat), 2026
Venue: Gallery Seek (Caretta Shiodome B1F)

You have five days left to stand before this blue.

▶ For details and inquiries: https://art-scenes.net/ja/artworks/52449