SUSUMU KAMIJO: TABLE FOR US
Perrotin Hong Kong is pleased to announce Susumu Kamijo’s latest exhibition, Table for Us.
November 16, 2024 – January 4, 2025
Known for his playful, abstract paintings of poodles and other sentient forms, Kamijo here shifts gears into a more intimate space, where florals and creatures coalesce in arrangements that hover between fantasy and familiarity. What appears to be a traditional still life at first blush—Morandi-esque vases, plates of food, large goldfish with petal-like fins bulging in their bowls—quickly dissolves into riddles of texture and composition, pulsating with a strange vitality, even a glint of poison in Summer Blossoms (2024).
The still lifes are steeped in nostalgia, conjuring summers spent with his grandparents, the taste of watermelon, and the fleeting joys of festival nights. The red and blue goldfish swimming in bowls nod to kingyo sukui, the beloved summer game of goldfish scooping, where children raced against the fragility of paper nets in hope of taking a fish home. These memories, as gossamer-thin as the nets themselves, linger beneath the surface, shaping Kamijo's dreamlike arrangements.
In his application of color, Kamijo alludes to the color-field painters and the amorphous textures of Philip Guston. Broad arenas of blue, orange, and green acquire unexpected depth beneath a gauzy topcoat. At times, his stone-washed flower vases smolder with a sensuous intensity, as seen in the densely packed bloomscape of Summer Blossoms (2024). Despite the simple forms and the more uniform palette of past works, Kamijo’s brilliance as a colorist shines throughout Table for Us. In Three Fishes and Cosmos (2024), he conjures an elusive hue for the placemat and vase, reminiscent of Van Gogh’s mineral-infused green.
While Kamijo’s paintings assert cultural references and geography, time remains abstract and garbled. The sun could be setting or rising on the horizon line; objects could be contemporary or nostalgic. In John Ashbery’s 1991 poem The Improvement, he reminds us: “We never live long enough in our lives / to know what today is like.” This sentiment resonates within Table for Us. The works serve as pseudo still lifes—still frames imagined rather than simply observed. Yet, even the most quintessenial still lifes are, in a sense, counterfeit: an attempt to portray a present that forever eludes capture.