An absolute harmony of colours and shapes combines with a masterful combination of elements, abstractions and techniques. Toru Hamada, a protagonist on the international scene for more than thirty years, is presented for the first time to the Italian public with a personal showing at the Romberg Arte Contemporanea gallery. The exhibition retraces, through a careful selection, his pictorial, sculptural and collage production over the last ten years. Japanese, from Matsuyama, born in 1953, as a very young man he abandoned the East to land in the West, where he learns and refines his marble processing technique and his path as an artist.
No stories, no superstructure, Hamada's technique is pure force on canvas, spontaneous and sensory. He works through a dynamic process made up of thin overlaps, the surface looks slightly irregular, composed of intense colours vividly in contrast to each other. Indefinite forms. Never random.
In his slow working the painting continually breaks and interrupts its speech, changes course, adjusts itself, and Toru almost nullifies that something in order to recreate it in a new expression. Like a contemporary Matisse, in his work he writes a colour which emerges from an inner thrust, an impulse free of the reality around him; he, the artist, absorbs the energy of the composition, the vigour, causing it to then emerge on the outside. Time has no time, be it months or years, to give the canvas the right voice.
The intrinsic expressive force in his paintings translates into expressive power in his sculptural objects. Whether they are made of noble material such as marble or of more humble make such as steel, whether they are monochrome or vibrant colours, they manage to penetrate the space they occupy as dynamic presences. Smooth and linear volumetric masses, stratified like his pictorial technique, singular entities endowed with a solid primordial character.
And as in osmosis the third dimension also appears in his fascinating collages. They travel on high-speed rails, these curious shapes which float on candid surfaces. Mysterious compositions of elements tinted with colour, spontaneous flickers obtained and rediscovered in the paper. Abstractions of hybrid landscapes where you walk along roads that do not bear a name. Intricate journeys in which to wander and abandon ourselves to instinct.
Toru Hamada has a mantra that guides his life: what counts is not the destination, but the journey. An invitation for everyone to lose themselves in his unique universe, to discover things we have never seen, in places we have never been to.

opening : Thursday 14th December 2017 at 6 pm

mpefm ITALY art press release