Masaya Chiba’s solo exhibition “Sideward Exhibition” shifts the gallery space by ninety degrees. Ten diptychs hang laterally along the ceiling, floor and walls. Each combines an oil-on-canvas still life of a sculptural craft with smaller oil paintings precisely placed in cutouts of wood panel covered with Japanese paper and marked with QR codes.
Chiba’s approach involves multiple planes of perception. He takes abstract ideas or elementary structures, such as the family unit or the solar system, and translates them into wood or clay sculptures, which he then reproduces on canvas. While the artist’s previous paintings tend toward maximalism, this body is more sparse, thematically centered on those singular objects, delicate odes to structure that seem precariously balanced at best. More than considering the real physics at work, these images question the function of the appearance of stability.
A QR code pasted into the diptych Like several intersecting objects as they grow #7/Drawings with ghosts (all works cited 2023) leads to video Wise Sophia, which is built around a picture-in-picture. A built-in frame features a black and white clip of a rakugo performance, a traditional Japanese genre of storytelling in which a solo performer uses modulations of pitch, tone, and body to move between characters. In this clip, a man pleads with a god of death, while the larger frame of the video contains an anthropomorphic wooden sculpture attached to a dog’s leash. As the rakugo the interpreter utters his last pleas, the dog leaps and the sculpture collapses. The forward bend of his disappearance signals a pitiful failure, his legs persisting in standing upright even after disconnecting from the torso they cannot support. The object refuses to flatten out, to give up.
Chiba’s approach is also stubborn. However, by choosing to present the works sideways, he betrays the purposes of the paintings. These images, whose fundamental existential threat is the vertical axis of gravity, are no longer in danger of falling. The tension of their unstable construction relaxes. The lateral position suggests rest and resignation, but also a kind of joyful defiance of the dominant narratives. Chiba, going against the directional pull of his own paintings, wants to have the last word.
