Shinsaku Horita
堀田　真作

Two in one. That would be the shortest formula for Shinsaku Horita's world of images. The artist always produces two independent images, only to unite them into one. Divided into horizontal, vertical or diagonal strips, he places one strip of each picture next to another. Together they form a single image characterized by repetitive stripe patterns. This can be seen as a parental union of picture-father and picture-mother, who together put a strictly geometrically ordered picture into the world.

Those who, like Shinsaku Horita, reveal the genesis of the image in the picture itself, create a certain distance, the distance of the artistic concept. On the other hand, an immediate attraction emanates from the metallic material, etched and polished aluminum, as well as metallic paint. Even the more abstract than concrete motifs drawn on the aluminum want to seduce the viewer rather than keep him at a distance. What remains is a play of contrasts, which not only in aesthetic terms compatriots of the artist associate with his homeland: the north of Japan with its two-season weather of cold, harsh winter and hot dry summer. Embers and ice, heat and frost alternate almost without transition, similar to the strict sequence of aluminum strips in Horita's art. Yet it reflects a second, an adopted homeland. In her matter-of-fact pictorial composition, which reveals the means and structures, and the simultaneously sensual surface, references are made to post-war modernism, from monochrome abstraction to the emotionally tinged coolness in music and other areas of culture.