Juan Zurita / Akihito Takuma

Opening / 16.11. / 19:00 - 22:00

Exhibition / 17.11. - 06.01.

Art Bunker / Munich

Juan Zurita

My work moves within the framework of contemporary society, the lifestyle and the culture of image. The great city as a paradigm of Western society, as a container and as a context of a world that is constantly changing, that builds and deconstructs. A society of a great “visual culture” that is influenced by a constant traffic of “images”, arising from the virtual, from the digital and that modify our perception of reality.

Project synopsis

The tittle of my project is “Traffic”. It reviews the landscape while using it as a social metaphor. It is a reflection about the relevant position of the image in today’s society and the transfor- mation that it has suffered with the arrival of the digital world. They are pieces made with a hybrid approach, combining traditional pictorial techniques with digital ones for the initial sketch, ultimately resulting in a pictorial work. The base or sketch of my work begins with the search of images on the internet. In this case the repertoire of images are selected from traffic and street cameras. I created new images from the deconstruction and the overlapping of layers, giving another value to the images with interpretation codes proved by the new technologies. These digital sketches are then free-handed onto canvas, film and tape. I am interested in the idea of an image found, layer, overlap and perception.


Akihito Takuma

”There is beauty in unmanageable spaces.”

My works are made with oil paint on canvas. Before the paint has dried, I run a 2m wide brush from top to bottom, finishing the work all at once. With this method, it is impossible to correct any individual sections. My works treasure that momentary feeling of tension. They depict landscapes featuring cities or horizons, Japanese Yoshino cherry trees, or more abstract things.

Landscapes with cities or horizons inspire feelings of order. By running a brush over these, I want to bring depth to that order. Japanese Yoshino cherry trees are cloned from grafts of other trees. They spread rapidly in post war Japan because they are easy to manage, and I treat them as a symbol of that management. And I discovered that by running a brush over abstract things, various accidental white spots appeared.

My works always depict opposing forces - white and black or East and West, vertical and horizontal, surface and interior, dryness and moisture - in one image. I am eager to represent this delicate balance, whether it is seen or not. It might look destructive, but I do value balance.

Recently, in the repeated work that I have done up to now, I have come to feel that there is beauty in unmanageable spaces. Right now, there is nothing else that can replace the emotion of the time when the entire image is wrapped up, the huge brush runs over it, and the instant where it cannot be corrected any more.