McClain Gallery is pleased to announce our fifth solo exhibition of Japanese artist Katsumi Hayakawa titled Constellations of Matter, featuring recent paintings and wall-mounted paper and other media constructions composed of countless small elements that gather and disperse across the surface of each piece. Minute elements combine to create visual systems that resemble urban environments, information networks, natural phenomena, and material formations. In Hayakawa’s large paintings, iridescent paint creates broad, enveloping fields that subtly reflect light and seem to scatter it across the surface. These meticulously detailed pieces are energized as the viewer moves around them and the light shifts, much like the experience of observing constellations in the night sky.
Throughout his career, Hayakawa has explored images that emerge through the accumulation of countless small elements, beginning in the late 1990s. The paintings evoke a sense of space, with broad yet faint horizons and suspended unspecific shapes, suggesting a micro or macro scale. Deciding whether one is in a vast cosmos or at the tiny scale of the atom is difficult to pinpoint. The paper based constructions are sometimes more specific, referring directly to conduits or urban forms; still, the repetition and aggregation of the elements translate the work into abstraction: rhythm, color, and pattern. The works do not represent objects but relationships—temporary configurations within the material world: constellations of matter.
KATSUMI HAYAKAWA (b. 1970, Tochigi, Japan) creates three-dimensional paper works and installations that make visual connections between the complex and unseen substructure of the information age and the increasingly dense landscape of modern cities. He believes that urban construction embodies “the absence of existence, the absence of nothingness and the absence of the absence of absence.”
Painstakingly hand-crafted piece by piece, Hayakawa plays with the compositional idea of void vs. solid to amplify spatial relationships between alternative realities and metropolitan spaces. While examining the impression of architectural density, his constructions maintain the delicate nature of the material at hand. Made of paper, glue, string, and model-making materials, these works “initially read as a whole – a pulsating arrangement of regular shapes and volume – then as an assemblage of individual components that make up the holistic sculpture, systems of patterns and motifs emerge from the collective.” His inclusion of metallic materials evokes images of microchips and circuit boards, probing the relationship between the real and the virtual, what is natural and what is fabricated.
Katsumi Hayakawa (b. 1970, Tochigi, Japan) received his BFA from Nihon University College of Arts, Tokyo and his MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 1998. Hayakawa's works have been exhibited internationally at Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, Taiwan; Tokyo Wonder Site Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan; Yusto/Giner, Marbella, Spain; and Gallery MoMo, Tokyo, Japan, Rujswijk Museum, The Netherlands and throughout the U.S. His work is included in the collections of Louis Vuitton, Hong Kong and London; CAC Malaga, Spain; the American Embassy, Dubai; Target; The Royal Bank of Scotland; Entergy-Koch and Vincent & Elkins Law Firm, Houston.