After the success of the exhibition Recursions & Mutations, organized by Studio la Città on the Giudecca Island for the 58th Venice Art Biennale, Jacob Hashimoto continues his artistic research enriching his solo show in Verona with new works.
In addition to the well-known wall works made of colorful kites, the artist proposes some new pieces on paper – unique and limited editions – as well as a suspended installation adapted to the gallery space, with an absolutely diferent shape and combination of resin elements.
This installation, proposed in Venice in a more monumental dimension, is thus described by Hashimoto himself in the introduction to the exhibition catalog: “The Dark Isn’t the Thing to Worry About—a large hanging installation that I had been working on and growing over the last couple of years—has undergone its own natural mutations as I have shown it at various locations. At the time that Helene asked whether it would be possible to exhibit the piece in Venice, it was at SITE Santa Fe. I explained to Helene that as in past iterations of the sculpture, I would create a number of additional elements specifically for this version of the piece”. And then he goes on to say: “I suppose one could say my art is recursive and mutative: as a recursive system, it often uses the language and conventions of art to talk about art. It samples and steals, configures and reconfigures, all based on past experience, art history, design history, human history, and so forth. This system cannot exist autonomously, as it is bound to and part of the sequence and definition of art itself—and by extension, humanity itself”.
In this way the artist continues his work in Verona on the intersection of landscape and abstraction, diversifying a lot of measures and colors, also proposing small works, consisting of geometric modules made from Japanese paper, and tiny multi-coloured collages. In some cases the drawings are more rigorous and schematic, while in others they appear to be sinuous handwriting or lace, all superimposed and delicate, however; they all have in common a continuous research into modularity and the landscape. In the works of Jacob Hashimoto the individual components act as molecules which, following carefully studied models, give life to genuine ecosystems, whether natural, vegetable or artificial.
This is how Daniele Capra analyzes the latest works by Hashimoto: “his pictorial work is processual and hybrid, in which the elements dismantle and then recompose the image in a three-dimensional form, thanks to the use of various visual planes placed in parallel. Such an approach breaks down the planarity of the painting and perspective as the modality for representing the depth of space, impelling the observers to undertake an analysis of the work in relation to the dynamism of their body”.