The Brooklyn Rail

A marvelous promenade, and an obligatory meditation on the nature of perception, in the form of eighteen identical yet individual white panels, creeps around two sides of the gallery and envelops the viewer in a far-too-brief retrospective of the long career of Tadaaki Kuwayama. Untitled (2010), a single, gigantic work of art, contains many of Kuwayama’s precepts as an artist: that the paintings be non-representational, reproducible by anyone (though that is debatable), and lacking in traditional notions of painterliness. These 49 by 49-inch panels are generated by the crisscross interweaving of tape painted in white semi-gloss acrylic—they look like flattened mummy wrappings. The fact that there are so many motivates the viewer to walk, and the fact that they initially look very similar forces one to look more carefully. By setting up a performative viewing process, which Kuwayama does in other works in the show, he also encourages viewers to observe in a different way, with their bodies. In Untitled (2010), we notice that the tape forms a weft and weave of different kinds of lines: sharp highlights that are white, shadows that are black, and a soft amorphous line formed by the impression of one strip of painted tape over another. The series is entrancing, as are the two adjacent pieces, Untitled (2016) and Untitled (2016), which create a vast regular grid of small blue/green titanium squares whose iridescent color fluctuates with the smallest variation in the spectator’s point of view.

Despite the artist’s rejection of painting’s traditional propensities, Kuwayama does not shy away from a formalist dissection of the art form. He experiments with the meaning of framing, aiming to question why one would even decide to look at a singular isolated patch of color, or colors, on a wall to begin with. In Untitled (1974), the towering canvas is framed in neat, thin, aluminum strips. The canvas is painted metallic, with a second coat of varnish overlaying the paint so that there is a discernible difference in relative sheens at certain points. The broad, rectangular canvas is divided into four vertical bands by three more titanium strips. Kuwayama demands equal billing for both frame and “picture.” While we would never think of running a gold band down the face of the Mona Lisa, the artist is very reasonably questioning the hierarchy of the image and the complicated protocols involved in organizing the amalgam of data we receive through the portals of our eyes. He similarly plays with this in the square metallic glossy works Untitled (1977) with a pink hue and Untitled (1977) with a gray hue. Shine in these works is also of the essence, as their surface is inscrutable until we move closer or farther away and notice the sheen of the gallery lights intruding onto the surface of the painting, often our only indicator that we are looking at a reflective surface.

Kuwayama’s influence on painting, and specifically Minimalism, has been sorely underestimated. The early acrylic-on-paper-on-wood pieces have a suede-like light-absorbing surface that owes much to Ad Reinhardt’s tortured process of creating matte surfaces and Yves Klein’s obsession with monochromatic painting. But Kuwayama’s innovation was the complete focus of a painting’s subject to an ultimate, simple, geometric rectilinearity. He began showing at the Green Gallery in 1961, long predating fellow painters Blinky Palermo and Brice Marden, who would later paint very similarly. Kuwayama was included in Lawrence Alloway’s 1966 Systemic Painting exhibition at the Guggenheim, where a painting very similar to Untitled (1960)—in this show—was displayed. Untitled (1960) presents a green band over a blue band, with a thin strip of silver gilt separating the two. The two fields of color are of rich deep pigment with no sheen at all. The silver is stained with rivulets of color, mostly green, thanks to gravity, but the contamination of the shiny iridescent band pulls the eye to the deeper zones of color, where we begin to notice trickles of dried paint. These aren’t quite brushstrokes, but they do indicate process and allude to the hand of the artist. It’s a fascinating combination of blank purity and messy intentionality, not dissimilar to the artist’s later playful contradictions in Untitled (2010), of simultaneous repetition and difference. In Untitled (1961), he places two vertical bands of color, one red and one yellow, next to each other, separated by a precise, sharp line. In Untitled (1963), he similarly places bands of green and blue adjacent, but bookends the top and bottom of the canvas by a thin, clean strip of white. Both of these works flirt with this sublime-yet-human dyad: in these two paintings, we are mesmerized by the rich color but slowly begin to acknowledge the glittering sheen of a thin graphite line peeping out from the underpainting. They are perfectly executed with minimal traditional traces of the artist’s hand, yet they have imperfections; one is tempted to reference Wabi Sabi, the purposeful inclusion of imperfections in traditional Japanese art practices. Kuwayama creates a seemingly perfect, untouched visual puzzle that requires a substantial effort to unravel, but at the end we find him playfully dropping the breadcrumbs that lure us down the path.