Overview

SAI presents Ryo Matsuoka's solo exhibition titled “The Sky Loved by Someone. The Sky Loving Someone.” This marks Matsuoka's second solo exhibition at SAI, following the one in 2021.
 
Born in Tokyo in 1974, Matsuoka began his practice on the streets and in his travels in the 1990s. In the late 1990s, he started to create the painting series “Tokyo Rooftop,” where he covered rooftops of various buildings with paper and painted under the open sky and live painting collaborations series with musicians, writers, and others in improvisational settings. He later gained recognition as a pioneering artist in the early days of Tokyo's street scene. Continuing his artistic journey into the 2000s, Matsuoka presented works both domestically and internationally. He collaborated with the fashion brand Yohji Yamamoto and exhibited at Joyce Hong Kong and L'ECLAIREUR Paris. He continues to expand his activities beyond traditional art spaces, including creating ceiling paintings at Le Cafe V in Osaka in 2020 and contributing to the renovated Louis Vuitton Ikebukuro store in 2022.
 
Matsuoka employs various mediums such as painting, drawing, and embroidery in his practice, but his expression consistently emerges through a profound sense of immersion, with works spontaneously produced. Matsuoka states, “Creating art is never about setting a specific purpose. It's always just for fun.” One can sense a fundamental joy in the act of “drawing,” and the purity of the artwork seems to be evoked as traces of an act that flows within the notion of the conscious and the unconscious. Beyond the terminological distinction between abstract and figurative, painting and embroidery, the works are driven by a sensation as if they are born with their own will, much like trees growing in nature.
 
This exhibition “The Sky Loved by Someone. The Sky Loving Someone.”, consists of over 100 large-scale embroidery pieces and an installation of drawings that occupy an entire space. Matsuoka uses a sewing machine for his embroidery series, and all the work is done improvisationally much like a painting series. After a thread is passed through the fabric on the sewing machine, the artist moves the fabric to draw a line. By moving multiple layers of fabric back and forth in a reciprocating motion, a colored surface is created. The overall picture of the artwork cannot be recognised until it is completed. During the creation process, the artist's field of vision is limited to the area covered by both arms on the sewing machine table. In this context, the orientation of up, down, left, and right remains ambiguous, relying solely on sensation to drive the placement of stitches. Embroidery works require a vast amount of time and concentration to complete a single piece. This process provides a different sense of physicality and time axis compared to painting. In this exhibition, contrasting the direct embodiment of body movements shaping drawings highlights the possibilities and differences in expression.
 
The artworks capture something unseen but undeniably present, touching upon fragments of emotions that defy words. Having started drawing since childhood, Matsuoka has continued this practice for over 40 years, and his commitment to creation remains unwavering. We invite you to witness his ongoing and timeless creations.
 
 
“What did you see? What did you learn? What did you forget? It was a beautiful journey.
Slowly starting to move. Gradually whittling away. Returning to oneself.
Into the play, into the play. Just drawing.”
 
- Ryo Matsuoka
 
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