Zakamoto, an Avertisseur — Transcript of the Video Review
In my view, Akira Zakamoto has every right to consider himself a Japanese artist, for a very simple reason: as a child he had a healthy obsession — devoting every moment of the day to reading Japanese comics. This was, at first, the experience of a child reading stories of utterly surreal heroes, of thrilling metaphors. When the time came to choose a profession, he decided to become a painter — a painter by vocation, not out of professional coldness. He stumbled into no academy of fine arts, but studied communication, that is, the relationship between advertising and the object. When he left even that thoroughly persuasive trade, Zakamoto did not forget his childhood, his boyhood bound to manga, the Japanese comics that for Hugo Pratt were literary images.
Zakamoto is a painter who owes everything to the past, to the dream, but he also drew a lesson from that drawn literature: the sense of warriors and heroism, which he revisits in terms of justice and indignation. His compositions are anything but elegiac, and one must appreciate Zakamoto's inner solidity, which allows him to consider people and things in their condition of truth. For our painter, is the depiction of the hurricane a disturbance of the spirit? On the contrary, he knows how to grasp its metaphor as a warning message. For him painting is the suave and cultured means of communicating the daily mystification of reality. His inner solidity, in this case, keeps him from being swallowed in the sea of lies. Constantly engaged with the disquieting themes of our time, his attentive artist's conscience is guided along a path of merciless representations. His images are often expressed in an ironic key, amused and amusing, on other occasions even hallucinatory. In every thematic event Akira Zakamoto holds to his profession as a painter and chronicler of his time. Indeed, his tale is that of an apocalypse that serves to lift the veil from the present and then build a new future in a new, paradisiacal revelation. It would be no stretch to declare Akira Zakamoto the heir of the socialist realism that moved in Italy between 1946 and 1970 — artists already then riding the crest of critical and market favour, who at the same time managed to produce allegories on class struggle and on the youth struggle of 1968, of young bourgeois turned anti-bourgeois. Zakamoto, however, is a talented painter who is anything but realist — rather, utterly surreal. He is a suave inventor of metaphors, able to reconcile elegance of form with content that is often, and willingly, disquieting.
His pictorial execution is always impeccable; Zakamoto plays on tonalities, on chromatic counterpoints, on the delicacy of transitions, and for him to paint is, as for a composer, to create harmony and not disharmony — disharmony being what he observes outside, in the world; here lies his denunciation, verifiable in his recent works, in the 2015 cycle, absolutely important on an Italian painting scene that today gives us not content but aesthetic constructs for homes in need of economic status symbols. In a detailed series of surreal paintings, Zakamoto denounces how tormented our planet is, addressing the theme in a visionary representation of a humanity without landfalls, metaphorical on the level of ecological destruction. Here the situation that arose in the cities of Venice and Marghera, with the ensuing intervention of the magistracy, suits Zakamoto perfectly. In these works, in which he manages to raise Venice to a symbolic level for global environmental destruction and misdeeds, Zakamoto is refined enough to handle the lagoon city as small tiles that make us indignant at our — and your — indifference. What astonishes is to still have, today, a painter who works on paintings to give a message and who is at the same time a writer spending his time travelling and writing. The author favours telluric visions and, at the same time — a curious thing — depicts Venice with the expressive calm of a painter of landscape tradition or of urban architecture, and here he plays in a cultured and sly way, like all the intellectuals of the brush who give no discounts when they sink their blade into uncomfortable truths. His paintings are not visually uncomfortable; in appearance they are pleasant, decorous; but the difference between Zakamoto and an arte povera artist of '68 is that the '68 artists used curious, unusual materials — like Manzoni's merda — and the bourgeoisie overpaid them even though the works were conceived to be unsellable, whereas Zakamoto plays another, far more refined game: he offers the cultured, engaged bourgeoisie his message, which hung on the wall can be pleasantly decorative and, observed closely, can bestow a conscience that is not social but universal. The French novelist André Gide would have called Zakamoto "un avertisseur" — for his works are indeed a constant warning.
Zakamoto is a painter who owes everything to the past, to the dream, but he also drew a lesson from that drawn literature: the sense of warriors and heroism, which he revisits in terms of justice and indignation. His compositions are anything but elegiac, and one must appreciate Zakamoto's inner solidity, which allows him to consider people and things in their condition of truth. For our painter, is the depiction of the hurricane a disturbance of the spirit? On the contrary, he knows how to grasp its metaphor as a warning message. For him painting is the suave and cultured means of communicating the daily mystification of reality. His inner solidity, in this case, keeps him from being swallowed in the sea of lies. Constantly engaged with the disquieting themes of our time, his attentive artist's conscience is guided along a path of merciless representations. His images are often expressed in an ironic key, amused and amusing, on other occasions even hallucinatory. In every thematic event Akira Zakamoto holds to his profession as a painter and chronicler of his time. Indeed, his tale is that of an apocalypse that serves to lift the veil from the present and then build a new future in a new, paradisiacal revelation. It would be no stretch to declare Akira Zakamoto the heir of the socialist realism that moved in Italy between 1946 and 1970 — artists already then riding the crest of critical and market favour, who at the same time managed to produce allegories on class struggle and on the youth struggle of 1968, of young bourgeois turned anti-bourgeois. Zakamoto, however, is a talented painter who is anything but realist — rather, utterly surreal. He is a suave inventor of metaphors, able to reconcile elegance of form with content that is often, and willingly, disquieting.
His pictorial execution is always impeccable; Zakamoto plays on tonalities, on chromatic counterpoints, on the delicacy of transitions, and for him to paint is, as for a composer, to create harmony and not disharmony — disharmony being what he observes outside, in the world; here lies his denunciation, verifiable in his recent works, in the 2015 cycle, absolutely important on an Italian painting scene that today gives us not content but aesthetic constructs for homes in need of economic status symbols. In a detailed series of surreal paintings, Zakamoto denounces how tormented our planet is, addressing the theme in a visionary representation of a humanity without landfalls, metaphorical on the level of ecological destruction. Here the situation that arose in the cities of Venice and Marghera, with the ensuing intervention of the magistracy, suits Zakamoto perfectly. In these works, in which he manages to raise Venice to a symbolic level for global environmental destruction and misdeeds, Zakamoto is refined enough to handle the lagoon city as small tiles that make us indignant at our — and your — indifference. What astonishes is to still have, today, a painter who works on paintings to give a message and who is at the same time a writer spending his time travelling and writing. The author favours telluric visions and, at the same time — a curious thing — depicts Venice with the expressive calm of a painter of landscape tradition or of urban architecture, and here he plays in a cultured and sly way, like all the intellectuals of the brush who give no discounts when they sink their blade into uncomfortable truths. His paintings are not visually uncomfortable; in appearance they are pleasant, decorous; but the difference between Zakamoto and an arte povera artist of '68 is that the '68 artists used curious, unusual materials — like Manzoni's merda — and the bourgeoisie overpaid them even though the works were conceived to be unsellable, whereas Zakamoto plays another, far more refined game: he offers the cultured, engaged bourgeoisie his message, which hung on the wall can be pleasantly decorative and, observed closely, can bestow a conscience that is not social but universal. The French novelist André Gide would have called Zakamoto "un avertisseur" — for his works are indeed a constant warning.
Akira Zakamoto a mio avviso ha tutte le carte in regola per considerarsi un artista giapponese, per un motivo molto semplice: quando era bambino aveva una sana mania, quella di dedicarsi in ogni momento della giornata alla lettura dei fumetti giapponesi. Questa per lui è stata inizialmente l'esperienza del bambino che legge storie di eroi del tutto surreali, delle metafore eccitanti. Giunto poi il momento della scelta professionale, decide di diventare pittore, e diventa pittore per elezione non a livello di freddezza professionale. Non si inciampa in nessuna accademia di belle arti, ma studia comunicazione, ovvero il rapporto tra la pubblicità e l'oggetto. Nel momento in cui lascia anche questo mestiere assolutamente persuasivo, Zakamoto non dimentica la sua infanzia, la sua fanciullezza legata ai manga, i fumetti giapponesi che per Hugo Pratt erano immagini letterarie.
Zakamoto è un pittore che deve tutto al passato, al sogno, ma ha avuto anche una lezione da questa letteratura disegnata: il senso dei guerrieri e dell'eroismo, che rivisita in chiave di giustizia e di sdegno. Le sue sono composizioni tutt'altro che elegiache di cui va apprezzata la solidità interiore di Zakamoto, questa gli consente di considerare uomini e cose nella loro condizione di verità . Per il nostro pittore la rappresentazione dell'uragano è un turbamento dello spirito? Al contrario, ne sa cogliere la metafora come un messaggio ammonitore. La pittura per lui è il mezzo suadente e colto come comunicazione della quotidiana mistificazione della realtà . La propria solidità interiore in questo caso non gli permette di rimanere inghiottito nel mare delle menzogne. Costantemente impegnato in tematiche inquietanti del nostro tempo la sua coscienza attenta di artista e guidata verso un percorso di rappresentazioni impietose. Le sue sono immagini espresse in chiave spesso ironica, divertita e divertente, in altre occasioni anche allucinanti. In ogni evento tematico Akira Zakamoto si attiene alla sua professione di pittore e di cronista del proprio tempo. In effetti il suo racconto è quello di un apocalisse che è funzionale per togliere il velo al presente e poter poi costruire un nuovo futuro in una nuova rivelazione in chiave paradisiaca. Non sarebbe una forzatura dichiarare che Akira Zakamoto sia l'erede del realismo socialista che si muove in Italia in un arco di tempo che va dal 1946 al 1970 di artisti già in quel periodo sulla cresta dell'onda della critica e del mercato e che nel contempo riuscivano ad eseguire delle allegorie sulla lotta di classe e sulla lotta giovanile del '68 di giovani borghesi diventati anti borghesi. Akira Zakamoto è invece un pittore di talento tutt'altro che realista quanto mai surreale. E' un inventore suadente di metafore capace di conciliare l'eleganza delle forme con il contenuto spesso e volentieri inquietante.
L'esecuzione pittorica è sempre ineccepibile, Zakamoto gioca sulle tonalità , sui contrappunti cromatici, sulla delicatezza dei passaggi e per lui dipingere è come per il compositore musicale creare armonia e non disarmonia, la disarmonia è ciò che lui nota all'esterno del mondo, qui sta la sua denuncia verificabile nei suoi lavori recenti, nel ciclo del 2015 assolutamente importante sulla scena pittorica italiana che oggi non ci regala contenuti ma costrutti estetici per le case che necessitano di status symbol economici. In una dettagliata serie di quadri surreali Zakamoto denuncia quanto sia martoriato il nostro pianeta, affronta il tema in una rappresentazione visionaria di un umanità senza approdi e metaforica sul piano della distruzione ecologica. In questo caso a Zakamoto viene a pennello la situazione creatasi nelle città di Venezia e di Marghera con il seguito dell'intervento della magistratura. In questi lavori in cui riesce a portare Venezia a livello simbolico per la distruzione e i misfatti ambientali globali, Zakamoto è così raffinato da gestire la città lagunare a livello di tasselli che ci rendono sdegnati per la nostra e la vostra indifferenza. Ciò che stupisce è avere ancora oggi un pittore che opera su dipinti per dare un messaggio e nel contempo è anche uno scrittore che passa il suo tempo in viaggio a scrivere. L'autore privilegia visioni telluriche e, nel contempo, fatto curioso, riprende Venezia con la tranquillità espressiva di un pittore di tradizione paesaggistica oppure di architettura urbana, è qui gioca in modo colto e subdolo come tutti gli intellettuali del pennello che non fanno sconti quando affondano la loro lama in fastidiose verità . I suoi quadri non sono fastidiosi a livello visivo, in apparenza sono piacevoli, di decoro, ma la differenza che passa tra Zakamoto e un artista dell'arte povera del 68, è che gli artisti del 68 utilizzavano materiali curiosi, inusuali come la merda di Manzoni e la borghesia li strapagava anche se i lavori erano stati pensati per non poter essere vendut, mentre Zakamoto fa un altro gioco, molto più raffinato, offre alla borghesia colta, partecipe, il suo messaggio che appeso alle pareti può essere piacevolmente decorativo e osservato a fondo può donare coscienza non sociale ma universale. Il romanziere francese Andrè Gide avrebbe definito Zakamoto "un avertisseur", i suoi lavori infatti sono un costante avvertimento.
Zakamoto è un pittore che deve tutto al passato, al sogno, ma ha avuto anche una lezione da questa letteratura disegnata: il senso dei guerrieri e dell'eroismo, che rivisita in chiave di giustizia e di sdegno. Le sue sono composizioni tutt'altro che elegiache di cui va apprezzata la solidità interiore di Zakamoto, questa gli consente di considerare uomini e cose nella loro condizione di verità . Per il nostro pittore la rappresentazione dell'uragano è un turbamento dello spirito? Al contrario, ne sa cogliere la metafora come un messaggio ammonitore. La pittura per lui è il mezzo suadente e colto come comunicazione della quotidiana mistificazione della realtà . La propria solidità interiore in questo caso non gli permette di rimanere inghiottito nel mare delle menzogne. Costantemente impegnato in tematiche inquietanti del nostro tempo la sua coscienza attenta di artista e guidata verso un percorso di rappresentazioni impietose. Le sue sono immagini espresse in chiave spesso ironica, divertita e divertente, in altre occasioni anche allucinanti. In ogni evento tematico Akira Zakamoto si attiene alla sua professione di pittore e di cronista del proprio tempo. In effetti il suo racconto è quello di un apocalisse che è funzionale per togliere il velo al presente e poter poi costruire un nuovo futuro in una nuova rivelazione in chiave paradisiaca. Non sarebbe una forzatura dichiarare che Akira Zakamoto sia l'erede del realismo socialista che si muove in Italia in un arco di tempo che va dal 1946 al 1970 di artisti già in quel periodo sulla cresta dell'onda della critica e del mercato e che nel contempo riuscivano ad eseguire delle allegorie sulla lotta di classe e sulla lotta giovanile del '68 di giovani borghesi diventati anti borghesi. Akira Zakamoto è invece un pittore di talento tutt'altro che realista quanto mai surreale. E' un inventore suadente di metafore capace di conciliare l'eleganza delle forme con il contenuto spesso e volentieri inquietante.
L'esecuzione pittorica è sempre ineccepibile, Zakamoto gioca sulle tonalità , sui contrappunti cromatici, sulla delicatezza dei passaggi e per lui dipingere è come per il compositore musicale creare armonia e non disarmonia, la disarmonia è ciò che lui nota all'esterno del mondo, qui sta la sua denuncia verificabile nei suoi lavori recenti, nel ciclo del 2015 assolutamente importante sulla scena pittorica italiana che oggi non ci regala contenuti ma costrutti estetici per le case che necessitano di status symbol economici. In una dettagliata serie di quadri surreali Zakamoto denuncia quanto sia martoriato il nostro pianeta, affronta il tema in una rappresentazione visionaria di un umanità senza approdi e metaforica sul piano della distruzione ecologica. In questo caso a Zakamoto viene a pennello la situazione creatasi nelle città di Venezia e di Marghera con il seguito dell'intervento della magistratura. In questi lavori in cui riesce a portare Venezia a livello simbolico per la distruzione e i misfatti ambientali globali, Zakamoto è così raffinato da gestire la città lagunare a livello di tasselli che ci rendono sdegnati per la nostra e la vostra indifferenza. Ciò che stupisce è avere ancora oggi un pittore che opera su dipinti per dare un messaggio e nel contempo è anche uno scrittore che passa il suo tempo in viaggio a scrivere. L'autore privilegia visioni telluriche e, nel contempo, fatto curioso, riprende Venezia con la tranquillità espressiva di un pittore di tradizione paesaggistica oppure di architettura urbana, è qui gioca in modo colto e subdolo come tutti gli intellettuali del pennello che non fanno sconti quando affondano la loro lama in fastidiose verità . I suoi quadri non sono fastidiosi a livello visivo, in apparenza sono piacevoli, di decoro, ma la differenza che passa tra Zakamoto e un artista dell'arte povera del 68, è che gli artisti del 68 utilizzavano materiali curiosi, inusuali come la merda di Manzoni e la borghesia li strapagava anche se i lavori erano stati pensati per non poter essere vendut, mentre Zakamoto fa un altro gioco, molto più raffinato, offre alla borghesia colta, partecipe, il suo messaggio che appeso alle pareti può essere piacevolmente decorativo e osservato a fondo può donare coscienza non sociale ma universale. Il romanziere francese Andrè Gide avrebbe definito Zakamoto "un avertisseur", i suoi lavori infatti sono un costante avvertimento.
In my view, Akira Zakamoto has every right to consider himself a Japanese artist, for a very simple reason: as a child he had a healthy obsession — devoting every moment of the day to reading Japanese comics. This was, at first, the experience of a child reading stories of utterly surreal heroes, of thrilling metaphors. When the time came to choose a profession, he decided to become a painter — a painter by vocation, not out of professional coldness. He stumbled into no academy of fine arts, but studied communication, that is, the relationship between advertising and the object. When he left even that thoroughly persuasive trade, Zakamoto did not forget his childhood, his boyhood bound to manga, the Japanese comics that for Hugo Pratt were literary images.
Zakamoto is a painter who owes everything to the past, to the dream, but he also drew a lesson from that drawn literature: the sense of warriors and heroism, which he revisits in terms of justice and indignation. His compositions are anything but elegiac, and one must appreciate Zakamoto's inner solidity, which allows him to consider people and things in their condition of truth. For our painter, is the depiction of the hurricane a disturbance of the spirit? On the contrary, he knows how to grasp its metaphor as a warning message. For him painting is the suave and cultured means of communicating the daily mystification of reality. His inner solidity, in this case, keeps him from being swallowed in the sea of lies. Constantly engaged with the disquieting themes of our time, his attentive artist's conscience is guided along a path of merciless representations. His images are often expressed in an ironic key, amused and amusing, on other occasions even hallucinatory. In every thematic event Akira Zakamoto holds to his profession as a painter and chronicler of his time. Indeed, his tale is that of an apocalypse that serves to lift the veil from the present and then build a new future in a new, paradisiacal revelation. It would be no stretch to declare Akira Zakamoto the heir of the socialist realism that moved in Italy between 1946 and 1970 — artists already then riding the crest of critical and market favour, who at the same time managed to produce allegories on class struggle and on the youth struggle of 1968, of young bourgeois turned anti-bourgeois. Zakamoto, however, is a talented painter who is anything but realist — rather, utterly surreal. He is a suave inventor of metaphors, able to reconcile elegance of form with content that is often, and willingly, disquieting.
His pictorial execution is always impeccable; Zakamoto plays on tonalities, on chromatic counterpoints, on the delicacy of transitions, and for him to paint is, as for a composer, to create harmony and not disharmony — disharmony being what he observes outside, in the world; here lies his denunciation, verifiable in his recent works, in the 2015 cycle, absolutely important on an Italian painting scene that today gives us not content but aesthetic constructs for homes in need of economic status symbols. In a detailed series of surreal paintings, Zakamoto denounces how tormented our planet is, addressing the theme in a visionary representation of a humanity without landfalls, metaphorical on the level of ecological destruction. Here the situation that arose in the cities of Venice and Marghera, with the ensuing intervention of the magistracy, suits Zakamoto perfectly. In these works, in which he manages to raise Venice to a symbolic level for global environmental destruction and misdeeds, Zakamoto is refined enough to handle the lagoon city as small tiles that make us indignant at our — and your — indifference. What astonishes is to still have, today, a painter who works on paintings to give a message and who is at the same time a writer spending his time travelling and writing. The author favours telluric visions and, at the same time — a curious thing — depicts Venice with the expressive calm of a painter of landscape tradition or of urban architecture, and here he plays in a cultured and sly way, like all the intellectuals of the brush who give no discounts when they sink their blade into uncomfortable truths. His paintings are not visually uncomfortable; in appearance they are pleasant, decorous; but the difference between Zakamoto and an arte povera artist of '68 is that the '68 artists used curious, unusual materials — like Manzoni's merda — and the bourgeoisie overpaid them even though the works were conceived to be unsellable, whereas Zakamoto plays another, far more refined game: he offers the cultured, engaged bourgeoisie his message, which hung on the wall can be pleasantly decorative and, observed closely, can bestow a conscience that is not social but universal. The French novelist André Gide would have called Zakamoto "un avertisseur" — for his works are indeed a constant warning.
Zakamoto is a painter who owes everything to the past, to the dream, but he also drew a lesson from that drawn literature: the sense of warriors and heroism, which he revisits in terms of justice and indignation. His compositions are anything but elegiac, and one must appreciate Zakamoto's inner solidity, which allows him to consider people and things in their condition of truth. For our painter, is the depiction of the hurricane a disturbance of the spirit? On the contrary, he knows how to grasp its metaphor as a warning message. For him painting is the suave and cultured means of communicating the daily mystification of reality. His inner solidity, in this case, keeps him from being swallowed in the sea of lies. Constantly engaged with the disquieting themes of our time, his attentive artist's conscience is guided along a path of merciless representations. His images are often expressed in an ironic key, amused and amusing, on other occasions even hallucinatory. In every thematic event Akira Zakamoto holds to his profession as a painter and chronicler of his time. Indeed, his tale is that of an apocalypse that serves to lift the veil from the present and then build a new future in a new, paradisiacal revelation. It would be no stretch to declare Akira Zakamoto the heir of the socialist realism that moved in Italy between 1946 and 1970 — artists already then riding the crest of critical and market favour, who at the same time managed to produce allegories on class struggle and on the youth struggle of 1968, of young bourgeois turned anti-bourgeois. Zakamoto, however, is a talented painter who is anything but realist — rather, utterly surreal. He is a suave inventor of metaphors, able to reconcile elegance of form with content that is often, and willingly, disquieting.
His pictorial execution is always impeccable; Zakamoto plays on tonalities, on chromatic counterpoints, on the delicacy of transitions, and for him to paint is, as for a composer, to create harmony and not disharmony — disharmony being what he observes outside, in the world; here lies his denunciation, verifiable in his recent works, in the 2015 cycle, absolutely important on an Italian painting scene that today gives us not content but aesthetic constructs for homes in need of economic status symbols. In a detailed series of surreal paintings, Zakamoto denounces how tormented our planet is, addressing the theme in a visionary representation of a humanity without landfalls, metaphorical on the level of ecological destruction. Here the situation that arose in the cities of Venice and Marghera, with the ensuing intervention of the magistracy, suits Zakamoto perfectly. In these works, in which he manages to raise Venice to a symbolic level for global environmental destruction and misdeeds, Zakamoto is refined enough to handle the lagoon city as small tiles that make us indignant at our — and your — indifference. What astonishes is to still have, today, a painter who works on paintings to give a message and who is at the same time a writer spending his time travelling and writing. The author favours telluric visions and, at the same time — a curious thing — depicts Venice with the expressive calm of a painter of landscape tradition or of urban architecture, and here he plays in a cultured and sly way, like all the intellectuals of the brush who give no discounts when they sink their blade into uncomfortable truths. His paintings are not visually uncomfortable; in appearance they are pleasant, decorous; but the difference between Zakamoto and an arte povera artist of '68 is that the '68 artists used curious, unusual materials — like Manzoni's merda — and the bourgeoisie overpaid them even though the works were conceived to be unsellable, whereas Zakamoto plays another, far more refined game: he offers the cultured, engaged bourgeoisie his message, which hung on the wall can be pleasantly decorative and, observed closely, can bestow a conscience that is not social but universal. The French novelist André Gide would have called Zakamoto "un avertisseur" — for his works are indeed a constant warning.