Masayuki Arai

Masayuki Arai was born in 1984 in Wisconsin.

currently he lives and works in Ibaraki prefecture, Kanto Region, Japan.

He completed Master’s course in Fine Art at Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Arts and Music in 2011 and his works have been shown in Aichi Triennale 2013 and VOCA 2014. His work process has continually involved printing out and pasting images collected from the Internet onto a canvas and then expanding them out imaginatively. In this exhibition, we will show some of Arai’s newest works.

In recent years, Arai has started to peel off the photographs that were pasted onto the canvas, leaving the outer imagined, painted parts intact. In repeating this action, pasting new photographs onto it and then drawing and extending the outer parts, the image becomes entangled and layered. With his process of capturing the representations of re- ality “like paintings” Arai transforms the units and forms of the use of the paint itself. The paintings, created by dripping paint from a syringe, move back and forth between image and physical matter depending on the distance from which they are viewed. This gives a sense of reality to the supposedly fictional images.

Arai does not talk much about the photographs used in his work. The viewer is left to imagine what the stripped photographs looked like and from where the scenes depicted in the paintings follow on, without ever knowing their starting point. The absence of the photographs that constituted the starting points for the paintings, and the build- up of the painted depictions that remain on the canvas remind us of the complex relationship between what we accumulate and share every day in the real world, and at the same time highlight their ambiguity.