Tetsutaro Kamatani
Threshold between Reality and Illusion

There is a garden. A large folding screen stands as though facing it.

In the garden are stones, trees, and water. On the surface of the screen are countless transparent, glossy dots.
The two do not closely resemble one another. Rather, they create worlds in entirely different ways.

The stones, the trees and grasses, the water—all have weight, occupy a place, and change with the seasons.

In Kamatani’s painting, the garden is broken down into colors and planes of color, taking material form through an intensely tactile “pointillism.”
The painting reflects light, first catching our eye. And so a garden begins to exist within the eye.

It may seem natural to regard the actual garden as “reality” and the painting as “illusion.”
Yet a garden is never nature in its raw state; it is nature composed.
Meanwhile, the garden Kamatani paints exists as tangible matter—not as an “illusory image,” but as a physical object that acts upon the eye.

Both, then, are experiences that cross between reality and illusion.
The spatial arrangement of natural elements, and the retinal arrangement of “color as matter.”

The garden is not a “background,” nor is the painting a “direct reproduction.”
The work dissolves into the garden, and the breath of light within the work spreads through the garden.

Between people and art, between sight and touch, between landscape and nature, between illusion and reality—this exhibition exists, gently swaying between them.