Shinya Yamamoto Solo Exhibition
My Squares / Palettes
[Dates] October 17 (Fri)–November 1 (Sat), 2025
[Hours] 12:00–6:00 p.m.
*Closed on Sundays, Mondays, and Tuesdays.
[Venue] GALLERY TOMO
[Address] 1st Floor, Aoyama Building, 633 Shimogoryomaecho, south side of Teramachi-dori east of Marutamachi, Nakagyo-ku, Kyoto 604-0995, Japan
My Squares
In this series, I give myself some parameters to paint a square on a square canvas. However, I do not trace a line four times with a ruler. On the contrary, I choose to apply (or remove) paints in ways that involve a great number of accidents so as not to reach the goal easily. So first, these accidents are essential. Nevertheless, it is me that moves in front of the canvas, and it is me who decides the palette. Furthermore, since the goal is painting a square - the most rational and artificial shape, the framework of this painting is “inevitability”. My squares emerge as countless accidents mould around an inevitable framework. In the same way, it could be a metaphor for our lives. It is we ourselves who choose “this road”, but we encounter countless happenings along the way. We shape our lives as we take on these unexpected experiences.
The second purpose of this series is to bury Marcel Duchamp. In contemporary art, where Duchamp (or perhaps I should say Duchampians) has been the starting point, subject matter (in other words, “what to paint”) has often taken precedence. Works have sometimes become mere vehicles for ideological or political statements, concepts or messages, or just “add-ons” to this kind of language. I object to this situation with my squares. By choosing the square - a motif with minimal meaning, and specializing in “how to paint,” I want to restore the power of the painting as an object. I want to show that paintings can express things that language cannot. And focusing on “how to paint” will eventually reveal “what to paint”. Painters are “painters” before “artists”. We are not captives living in the narrow prison of contemporary art, of postmodernism, of language. Paintings should go beyond “gray matter” and stimulate the entire body.
Palettes
In my usual painting process, I apply paints on the canvas then scratch or scrape them off, leaving discarded material. It would be wasteful to throw them away, so I painted this series using the leftovers. Here I don’t do this intentionally to be sustainable, but the main point is the following: Sometimes I am jealous of my own paint palette. When I look at it, I naturally see my favorite colors there, and the way the paints are mixed and combined together by chance doesn’t seem artificial at all. Often they are well-balanced and in the right composition, making a very attractive pattern. Thus I wanted to create works similar to what I see on my palette, so I use the discarded paints and apply and re-apply them on small format canvases, until satisfying compositions are made by chance. In this way, the Palettes series was born. However unexpectedly, this may have resulted in a group of works that reveal something essential such as my own physicality, sense of color, and sense of composition.
