[About the series “CT”]
“CT” (Computed Tomography) is a series where the artist describes a scene as though the architecture is scanned, like a human body. Although we first accept the scene as an ordinary landscape, if you’d look again, you’d notice the scene is actually “impossible” to see.
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[Artist Statement]
In this series, I used my digital camera as a scanner and photographed architectures and revealed its hidden areas behind the wall, ceiling, and floor.
The photographic subjects in the series were a ruined house with violently painted walls of multiple colors that were originally built as a charity by a church in London, as well as a short-term furnished apartment I resided in. Instead of cutting and splitting the actual architectural space as Matta-Clark once did, I made virtual slits into the layered digital images to make them look as though they were cut. The slits of various shapes with blurred outlines unrealistically cut the furnishings such as TVs and cupboards, to penetrate a gaze into the following room and to outside of the building.
Toshihiro Komatsu
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[Essay on the “CT” series by Hitomi Iwasaki (Director of Exhibitions/Curator, Queens Museum)]
—Porosity, or the gap between vision and visual perception (from the essay “Toshihiro Komatsu and His Works”)
Space and vision. To transform a physical space into a two-dimensional image. Komatsu's “CT” series complicates the flatness of photography and the fictitiousness of represented spatial realism by manipulating its pictorial surface. He introduces various ‘pores’ into the photographic expressions that may be a visual, physical, or at times conceptual rendering of reality. Incorporating highly sophisticated mediation with optical and constructive knowledge and technology, Komatsu juxtaposes elements that seemingly diametrically oppositional: personal vs. socio-historical, emotional vs. intellectual, active vs. passive, or systematic vs. poetic. While ubiquitous, the densely layered complex imagery of digital imaging is presented in “CT” as a printed photograph on paper in a traditional picture frame, not on a computer or a large LED screen. The colorful interior walls of a European house are penetrated by (instead of superimposed with) impactful graphic effects of geometric patterns, which result in disrupting the autonomy of the foreground. By canceling off the perspective balance of the depicted space with this effect akin to an optical illusion, it confuses the border between reality and fiction. A tension arises between the visual/optical cognition and the habitual imprinting of our eye and mind, which makes us believe “it appears this way, so it should be this way.”
Hitomi Iwasaki, Director of Exhibitions/Curator, Queens Museum
2020, New York
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[Artist Profile]
Toshihiro Komatsu was born in Hamamatsu City, Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan in 1966. After receiving his M.F.A. at Tokyo University of the Arts, Graduate School (1993), and his M.S. at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture (1999), Komatsu has showcased in museums such as MoMA PS1 (1999, New York) and Queens Museum (2000-01, New York) after participating in residency programs in Amsterdam and New York. He has also actively participated in international art festivals, including the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale (2012/2015, Niigata, Japan) and Setouchi Triennale (2013, Kagawa, Japan), and more others.