Takahiko Hayashi, “Breath of Life, Breath of Line”

by Matthew Kangas

Froelick Gallery, Portland, Oregon

Exhibition continues through July 13, 2024

Takahiko Hayashi, “D-23. JAN 1018,” 2018, pigment acrylic ink, original emulsion base on Gampi paper mounted on Hahnemühle cotton rag, 16 1/2 x 11”. All images courtesy of Froelick Gallery, Portland

The prominent Japanese printmaker Takahiko Hayashi continues to extend the parameters of traditional printmaking by etching, gluing, collaging, painting and otherwise expanding strict limits of paper size, printing techniques and impression methods. Not really multiples, each of Hayashi’s works has a different image, although all relate to the 63-year-old artist’s current theme of “Breath of Life, Breath of Line” with their puffs of color and air mixed with meandering and zigzagging lines surrounding and overlaying central, ghostly forms. Paper size and edges vary throughout to keep the eye moving as Hayashi repeatedly employs his strict palette of red, blue, green and black. This pushes the entire body of work towards being a serial suite, but always skirts this in favor of individual configurations of bubbles and lines.

The gallery is filled with flat and drooping handmade sheets of paper and parchment that are alternately inscribed, pooled with puddles of ink, and rubbed with pigmented acrylic. One feels the touch of the master’s hand, but what else is there? Apart from a technical prowess that often suffices for avid print collectors and the professional eye of curators, what is it that pushes Hayashi’s considerable studio abilities into the realm of art? Just as the other crafts — pottery, weaving, glass, and wood — have had to make their case for fine art status, it is fair to ask the same question of Hayashi’s particular form of printmaking. Although his statements have rigorously disclaimed interest in the current contemporary art scene with all its fickle vagaries, he vows an interest in the wider world as well as reflection on an unknowable future.

Takahiko Hayashi, “P-14. JAN 2024,” 2024, acrylic ink on parchment, 47 x 32 1/4”

Gazing closely, the attentive viewer can unravel or unveil both identifiable imagery and deeper content, key to claiming aesthetic status for the crafts. Hayashi convincingly asserts that the image is the unformed or hidden human figure. For instance, “P-21 JAN 2024” features a central red figure covered with bursting red bubbles of energy while rising lines explode from the “head.” Similarly, two images exist simultaneously in “D-23 OCT 2023,” a tree with branches spiraling above and a darkened blue head below, just above its trunk.

Landscape is also a predominant theme, even going so far as to suggest an endangered nature from climate change or the residue of nuclear fallout. This is most evident in “D-11 MAR 2024,” “D-22 JAN 2024 Things to be Unleashed,” and “D-6 FEB 2024 Dropping White Dots,” with their unmistakable mushroom clouds. Four tiny (seven-by-four-inch) copperplate etchings extend the bulging upper shape of the nuclear blast into four colors, brown, green, blue and yellow with an earthy brown base and ascending black shapes like birds — or souls of the dead.

Takahiko Hayashi, “D-4. FEB 2024, Breath of Life, Breath of Line,” 2024, acrylic ink on Gampi paper mounted on cotton rag, 16 3/4 x 11”

Nature, philosophy and religion are all intertwined in Japanese culture, a heady source Hayashi feeds on in provocative and beautifully appealing works like “P-12 DEC  2023,” with its blue energy dots exploding off the irregularly edged parchment page, and the exhibit title piece, “D-4 FEB 2024 Breath of Life, Breath of Line.” Blue, green and black balloons of color rise from the earth, extending into a troubled world to release stores of energy and globular spurts of life-giving breath. Another torn-edge work, “P-14 JAN 2024” resembles an animal skin with its white background. An upper blue blob hovers over a scattering of smaller blue dots. Energy is expended, but is it global warming or a process of enhancing and cooling, remediating climate change? Ambiguous, like all the others, we are free to contemplate each work or leave such questions unanswered.

Takahiko Hayashi, “S-23. OCT 2023,” 2023, acrylic, original emulsion base, Sukijimai Gampi paper, 25 1/2 x 19 3/4”

Darkest of all, with its eyes and faces staring out at us from a blue and gold ground covered in dots and scratches, “P-28 AUG 2023” is another truncated parchment fragment. But at nearly three feet in height, it commands close inspection and acts as a shield or haunting emblem for the entirety of the show.

Hayashi has created an astoundingly varied body of work, all the while maintaining limits of size, color, surface, image and meaning that vibrate back and forth between philosophical questions and exquisite material execution. 

Matthew Kangas writes regularly for Visual Art Source eNewsletter; Ceramics: Art & Perception (Australia); and Preview (Canada). Besides reviewing for many years at Art in America, American Craft, Art Ltd., Vanguard and Seattle Times, he is the author of numerous catalogs and monographs, the latest being the award-winning Italo Scanga 1932-2001. Four anthologies of his critical essays, reviews and interviews were issued by Midmarch Arts Press (New York) and available on Amazon at Books by Matthew Kangas