“At the end of the Soviet science fiction film Solaris the astronaut returns home. Everything seems real and normal but somehow he doesn’t trust in anything any longer … What is needed is a new story and one that we (he) can believe in.”

HyperNormalisation (2015)

If you are lucky, you might stumble across Takashi Katayama’s illustrations in a Japanese national newspaper. In reality, they are much larger and begin life as paintings. Yet the macro world view of a newspaper article partially explains the uncanniness in each scene. Apart from the odd passing car or solitary building one way, they are in one sense a snapshot devoid of human presence. Seen another way, each one depicts an almost always rural landscape straddling an unknown divide (border walls, lakes, oceans) while interrupting an almost perfect horizon littered by scattershot colour. Maybe these images have more to tell.

While each scene appears miles from anywhere obscured by a shower of colour that spreads like disinformation, it is hard to tell if each exists nearby of far away, if they were ever inhabited, human in scale or televisual in nature and no more real than the image from a TV screen. Clearly each picture is a painting except for the plaster sculpture split one way by a border wall and split in two by the other. Each one exists in that ‘journalistic’ space between fact and imagination in the same way as the articles they sometimes accompany. Despite feeling tangible and familiar each piece is open to interpretation and ambiguity.

I think it reasonable to assume that Takashi is setting ‘Distance & Points’ as the basis for a new story in a world that is extremely unbelievable and increasingly absurd. It is a story not hopeless but more hopeful than anything else, where any familiar sense of safety and security is reflected back in realtime as vignettes both lived-in and experienced at exactly the same time. In essence, a world that is more than normal.

Takashi Katayama

Distance & Points

片山高志個展「距離と点景」

2019年7月25日（木）〜8月6日

Alt_Medium

July 25 – August 6th