Daichi Takagi

The image-world of today is greater than at any time before, due in large part to the volume of pictures that daily pass before our eyes. A bus goes by and with it advertising. We step into an elevator, the doors close to reveal a photo of the desert at sunset. On the highway, billboards flash peripherally, one after another. This proliferation is also a matter of the ease with which everyone, not only photographers and artists, but everyone can make a picture or a short film with a phone in hand. More and more, everyone has one, visibly. We see others clutching them—afraid to let go? Rather than out of sight, kept in a pocket or a bag, only to be retrieved when necessary, the phone appears as an extension of the hand in which it is held, tethered, ready at any moment to reach out to someone, or to be reached. Everyone nowadays is their own personal assistant, on call at all times, but for what? A vibration that signals a sense of importance, being wanted or needed—the human desire for connection is satisfied, and with it a feeling of security. Is this a consequence of modern life, keeping at bay an aloneness that has increasingly crept toward the center from distant perimeters? What once centered human life—community, spirituality, and ritual—is less and less present, and in many ways is simply out of the past. Work has always given meaning to life. Some is solitary, that of artists and writers; some is collective, that of crews and teams. Don’t most of us need a reason to get out of bed in the morning? In work is purpose. Today, we have to ask, is remote work a recent development? Have we been working, and living—and seeing—remotely for some time now? We live in a time of information rather than knowledge. And art? Some who once visited galleries regularly now scroll through their phones. Art kept at arm’s length.

The way a person holds a phone is not the same as how a writer holds a pen or an artist holds a brush, extensions of our fingers, a form of body operating. These implements are considered by some to be obsolete, despite the fact that they connect us to a whole history of art and literature, and from them, by way of close observation and imagination, images and stories emerge that may help us to understand who we are and the world we inhabit. Of course, history is also a thing of the past. So, too, is literature. Although books continue to be written, many are read on screens or read to us. The actual object, with pages to be turned, has been shelved. And art history? Replaced by market results. Just how far have we come? In 1968, the American conceptual artist Douglas Huebler famously stated: “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more. I prefer, simply, to state the existence of things in terms of time and place.” Today, the number of artists may be larger than in any previous period. As they face increasing demands for their work, many are only too willing to comply. More than fifty years past Huebler, the volume of objects in the world has exponentially increased, and the volume is louder. Amid this clamor, and clamoring, do artworks potentially cancel out one other, and also themselves? Art is to be looked at. So, too, is the world. How many artists, as they hasten “the production life of happiness,” have time to look at themselves in the act of creating their work, and to ask, What does painting a picture mean? Some artists are on the inside looking out. Others are on the inside looking in. Daichi Takagi is one of them.

After years of wending his way through a diverse body of work, everything from still life and landscape to color, compositional and perceptual studies, from monochrome to pattern paintings and shaped canvases, moving between abstraction and representation, shifting towards more hybrid images, Daichi Takagi began to question himself, though with certainty. He wrote:

“I set aside for the moment everything of how I had worked before, and went back to seeing and drawing. It was all about drawing with ease, trying different things and finding my own way of rendering. About observing and sensing the objects, and the acts I depicted; acknowledging my own roots, my internal sensibilities, and generating images that were not borrowed; making sure these images served as pictures divorced from methods and ideas.”[1]

What is key here, our way into his work of the past few years, is his phrase: “sensing the objects.” This implies something beyond close observation, extrasensory? The artist as medium? What led him to this moment? A period of perhaps a dozen years in which Takagi explored and inventoried a range of picture-making to pursue the very idea of how to “speak” in a visual language, how to translate, we might say, world into image. He has referred to his early efforts, interestingly enough for what would follow, as “stepping stones.” In a grouping of paintings and drawings he produced up until 2010, he identifies “words and images, video, window, figurative and abstraction, void, figure and ground, brushstroke …” For a 2012-14 group, he lists: “still life, landscape, frame, edge, analogue, sequence, division, hard edge, and blurry.” Of works brought together accounting for investigations between 2015-16 he notes: “Recomposition, process, layer, gradation, illusion, draw/not draw, non-objective …” His 2017-18 grouping: “Repetition, combination, pattern, grid, simplicity, periphery, culture, propagation, intermixture …” And finally, in considering paintings and works on paper from 2019, he notes in the longest list: “Intuition, seeing, perceiving, drawing, stroke of the brush, boldness, horizontal line, vertical line, diagonal line, mental image, accident, contrast, black, light, color, line …”. All of these lists end with an ellipsis, as if they are inevitably incomplete, as only a record of ongoing activity can be. In that phrase, “sensing the objects,” Takagi expected more of himself than merely faithful representation, as if the sensing of what was within an object would allow for a heightened fidelity, to reveal what was within himself. His reflections arose as a result of a 2018-19 residency in the Netherlands; in leaving Japan he would, conversely, return to what may be characterized as an older Eastern esthetic—slower, meditative, concerned with the natural world, an art that has traditonally regarded mountains, rocks, caves, trees, lakes, streams and waterfalls as spirit inhabited—surely an esthetic at a distance from Western contemporary art, which has become, for all intents and purposes, a mostly empty category, driven more by external than internal forces. Takagi articulated his intention to move “closer to the image inside myself, to achieving greater precision,” and concluded: “Through such observations and contemplations, I hope to make my work more abstract, more my own ‘rendering,’ and move closer to the essence of what ‘painting a picture’ means to me.”

In this there is no doubt that creating an image has to mean something, imperatively. It can’t simply be produced. How most viewers encounter art is in a gallery or museum, where, hung on the wall, it appears to have always been in the world. Rarely do they ask, “How did it get here?” There is an unseen image behind every painting, that of the artist in the moment. In modern times, in the west, we became more attuned to this when confronted with the “action paintings” of Jackson Pollock by way of photographs and film. Ever since, the phantom figure of the painter hovers over and above. And yet what is unseen but sensed in certain artworks is another image, an after-image of time itself, the artist contemplating what is seen directly before them—arrangements of bottles and tins painted by Morandi, for example. Look closely at the fuzzy edges. This is a layer of dust, almost a soft fur, representing the passage of time. Morandi, an artist of whom Takagi is certainly well aware. Takagi’s intimate Still Life paintings (2011-13), when exhibited in Amsterdam in 2018, were presented alongside small ceramic and glass vessels, the artist corresponding images and objects, even if they may not have been the same objects rendered. In a returning to subjects that continue to yield images, there is also Vija Celmins, with stars in the night sky—black as obsidian, volcanic rock—the surface of the ocean, and spider webs—drawn by the artist, spun by the spider. The idea of an image of time and repetition, the artist engaged in the activity of painting as a meditation finds no more exemplary figure than On Kawara, who, with his Today series, recorded the date on which the painting was made, to be completed before midnight, an ongoing activity of nearly fifty years. Each painting has a subtitle. A number of them were related directly his daily activity, at times revealing his state of mind. “This painting itself is January 15, 1966,” “I am afraid of my ’Today’ paintings” (May 29, 1966), “I collect the painted days” (Nov. 18, 1966), “I got up at 12:48 P.M. and painted this” (May 11, 1969). Kawara sat at a desk to make his paintings, as if he was recording a diary entry for the day—painting as a for, of writing. Writing longhand, as the notes for this essay were, has been proven to result in greater cognition, thought better remembered and understood than something typed on a keyboard. Might the same be true for painting with a brush in hand? Quite possibly, since painting and writing, equally acts of mark-making, have correspondence. The idea of consciousness, which is paramount for Kawara, is of considerable importance for Takagi.

Since 2021, Takagi has produced paintings of stones, objects he himself has collected and rendered from life, in a convergence of realism, abstraction and impressionism, rather than hyper-realistically. While each painting may be considered a still life, are the stones alive to him, as the bottles were to Morandi? In some sense they must be. Takagi has noticed them as he walks around; something attracts him, otherwise he would have left them behind or never stopped in the first place. Collecting objects. This is where any number of artworks eventually arise. Vija Celmins gathered stones in New Mexico without knowing that she would later go on to recreate them as accurately painted bronzes, pairing them side-by-side, the stones and their doppelgängers: three-dimensional tromp l’oeil. The artist Alex Hay, with a return to painting after a long absence, wasn’t sure what his subject might be. Taking notice of weathered pieces of wood, bleached by the beating sun of Southern Arizona, where he lives, he brought them back to the studio, looked at them for a while, and decided to render them as closely as possible, employing an elaborate stencil method to do so: every image a trace of itself. But these works don’t “fool the eye” as Celmins’s small bronze sculptures do, possessing an object integrity that the fiction of painting can’t possibly compete with. While Hay’s canvases present what appears to be a plank of wood, that’s not what we see hung on the wall. We see a painted image, on canvas. This may hold true for Takagi’s Stone paintings as well. Hovering in a saturated black ground, the disorienting space they occupy, a cloak of mystery, has an impenetrable depth, while the picture plane parallels the gallery wall: a painted image flat to its support. And yet the stone projects towards us with dimensionality as the enveloping ground recedes. Takagi’s Stones, defying gravity in a weightless state, offer a realism entwined with fantastical unreality. Such a description applies to the Surrealist rock paintings of Magritte, of which Takagi is certainly aware, prominent among them, The Active Voice (1951), a gray-greenish rock over a monochrome orange field, The Invisible World (1954), picturing a large stone before open widows and balcony, overlooking a calm sea below ominous clouds, and Clear Ideas (1958), for which the artist has suspended a huge boulder in between a cottony cloud and the sea—contrasting ephemerality and solidity. Magritte relies on naturalistic settings for strangeness to assert itself. Takagi’s strangeness appears entirely natural. His images seem somehow factual. Each stone a painted fact. Or, as On Kawara would declare of his “Date” painting, “I painted this.”

A number of paintings feature more than one stone, groupings that allude to their collection and the comparative observation they offer. The number of stones in these works vary from three to eight; most often he presents five or six at a time. Here we see various shapes, sizes and coloration. What is true for all of these paintings, however, is that although they are set on a solid black background there is a suggestion of perspective on a tabletop horizon. This is not the naturalistic space a Magritte, an artist who plays the familiar off of the improbable. As Morandi before him, Takagi has clearly painted his arrangements. The stones in only one of these works truly defy gravity, a grouping of eight that appear vertically hovering one over another, as if the table in his studio had been upended but the stones remained buoyant. For some, the grouping of eight stones resembles our solar system, or simply space rocks. And while Takagi’s stones appear predominantly slate or granite grey, the groupings allow us to appreciate a wider range of color in his work: pale pink and orange, red, cobalt blue, purple, lilac, green, truffle brown, all offset by the nocturnal black of their suspended animation.

Of the many still life and landscape paintings Takagi has made, and continues to produce, he observes that they “were not about the story or what is depicted, but about how to depict and what it means to depict.”[2] If we go near to the surface of a Stone painting, especially the larger ones, so close that there’s no sense of the object that has been painted, the stone disappears. What appears are ridges and fissures, the texture and topography of the thing depicted, just as we see the ridges, fissures, texture, and topography of oil paint, its material actuality, its application and modulation: the stone’s surface and the surface of the painting having merged. Now, if we examine the background, what do we see? Some might say, “A black surface.” We ask, “But what else?” The surface seems polished, built up from multiple coats of oil paint, viscous, liquid and solid. The hand of the artist is visible in the invisibility of darkness. As Ad Reinhardt reminded us, “Black is not as black as all that.” Think of how, when we enter a dark room, within only seconds our eyes adjust and we begin to discern what’s there, drawing out shadowy forms. Entering a painting, even an abstraction, can be like that. In Takagi’s darkness we are also reminded of vanitas, allegorical meditations on mortality, from 17th century Dutch painting, its golden age. Takagi’s images float in a space which might, in fact, be deep space, representing eternity. His largest Stone resembles a planet, though more oblong than spherical, scarred by seismic activity or meteor showers. Cosmic as this sounds, as massive as the image-object appears, the original stone that Takagi painted may, in fact, have been held in the palm of his hand. We can’t assume that the stones in his paintings have been rendered in one-to-one scale. A realistic image need not be true to life, but true to itself.

Now, if we closely examine the stones, what do we see? There is much surface incident, the abstraction that Takagi seeks within painted reality. The topography of the large “planet,” for example, has much roughness, abraded in the way that artists wielding palette knives may sculpt and scrape away paint as they create a terrain worn away by friction or erosion. With a rare vertical format for the rendering of an attenuated stone set on its end, Takagi suggests a figure, possibly a Bodhisattva, one on the path to enlightenment and salvation, who seeks to become a Buddha. Regarding this “figure” closely, however, we see what may be old wood turned to stone, or an ossified moss, no longer spongy and alive, but fossilized. Although poised and graceful, the image in this panting calls to mind Chinese scholar’s rocks, among nature’s greatest sculpture, which are very often pitted, twisted, and bulbous, while also possessing undeniable grace and beauty. Evocative of the landscape in miniature, limestone scholar’s rocks have been a source of inspiration for artists and poets over many centuries. Takagi’s Stone paintings inevitably recall Japanese rock gardens, places of contemplation we associate with Zen Buddhism, their creation possibly dating as far back as the 8th century. What aligns these paintings of Takagi’s with much of what came before and inspired him, is a sense of timelessness that has its own acoustic properties. In proximity to Takagi’s vertical stone, we encounter an abstract-impressionism, a flurry of marks that cluster and collide, yet settle into an overall composition that is chaotically harmonic. Here we may ask, What is the sound in these paintings? Is it silence? Silence, as by John Cage’s example, allows us to hear whatever sounds are outside of it, near and far, and there are many. Silence is a space of contemplation: our inner thoughts, our mind amplified.

Takagi has referred to all the work that led to these paintings on the path taken to this point in time, with many turns and purposeful detours taken to investigate the act of picture-making across a span of nearly twenty years, as his stepping stones. He has identified the nocturnal figure painted since 2019—in the woods, on the shore, looking out towards a Moonlit horizon, small in relation to nature, as “wanderer,” a sense of searching personified. Takagi’s quietly emotional imagery must register for any number of viewers and critics as romantic. His Stone paintings have another resonance entirely. These images are archetypal, transcendental, timeless. With the Stone paintings we can all agree on what we see, the subject depicted, and yet in the end, without doubt, they are pictures of painting itself. In this they are also pictures of the artist who painted them. Where will Daichi Takagi wander next? Only he knows, or will, eventually. In the words of the great writer of imaginative fiction, J.G. Ballard, “All you can do is cling to your own obsessions. All of them, to the end. Be honest with them. Identify them. Construct your own personal mythology out of them and follow that mythology, follow those obsessions like stepping stones in front of a sleepwalker. … if you compromise with your obsessions, that way lies disaster.”[3]

—Bob Nickas, Daichi Takagi Paints a Painting

1 - Domani: The Art of Tomorrow, The Agency for Cultural Affairs, Japan, 2021, p. 42.

2 - The artist’s opening statement for the book, Daichi Takagi: 2010-2022, Kayokoyuki, Tokyo, 2022, p. 3.

3 - “Survival Guide; J.G. Ballard,” Index magazine, Oct./Mov. 1996, p. 50.