SHUHEI MATSUYAMA
Matsuyama s a painter of Japanese origin who has lived in Italy for some time. He has already provided many examples of his world which imperceptibly evolves, renews itself, always open to new sensations and experiences, whilst remaining fundamentally true to a – how can we call it – “panic” conception of the environment. He does not tackle the figurative, but echoes and traces of the natural, the biological can be glimpsed everywhere. The animate and inanimate incessantly recall each other in the medium of dust, at times polychromatic, at times monochrome. His drafts vibrate with an interior, continuous vital thrill.
This atmosphere of Brownian molecular movement sets the stage far the main characters, the decisive elements: a line, horizontal or vertical, at times only indicated by a different variation in color, at times visibly marked by a relief, a crest, a protrusion as in a plastic model to indicate a chain of mountains. The result is a division which hints, indicates, underlines and clearly invokes, depending on the case, one of the fundamental characteristics of the biological, but also of the inanimate, and certainly of the universal order: symmetry.
In this order we currently speak of “parallel universes” of ‘matter and anti-matter, of the “missing substance”. These disturbing hypotheses, which have scientific and philosophical implications at the same time, are noticed by artists, like Matsuyama, who are gifted with extremely sensitive antennas. A constant, symmetrical structure dominates within this order, which, in its revelation fulfillment, has some imperfection, some lack, same irregularity, thus configuring an “asymmetric” symmetry.
Just as the face or the biological body are unarguably symmetric, but never the exact mirror image of the two halves, likewise the paintings of Matsuyama, attentive to the echoes which come from visual experience, never reproduce in mirror form the binary division of his visions, but notice the fundamental consonance, with musical echoes, at times muffled or distorted or varied, Iike a great piece of orchestrated music.

In the later works some elongated lozenge shapes recall either wounds with clots of dark blood red color, or biological intimacy, or cracks in a mineral coating, uncovering scarlet or golden outcrops of magma. The elements, which are in any event binary, are always arranged to provide an allusion to a symmetrical form with various directions.

Those who have shown interest in Matsuyama’s work up to now have painted out oriental echoes, the influences of those same philosophies, a specific adhesion to nature, the medley of different sensitivities, both visual and musical, the importance of the medium with the overlapping of very special paper, to give the backgrounds the overall meaning of the painting, and also the echoes of experiences coming from this ~iar1 of the world where the artist now lives.
All this exists, and continues to provide animation for these enchanted images made of light and exquisite nuances, but also with decisive intervention which is bath disturbing and polysemous.

by Domizio Mori
June 1999