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| Born in Tokyo (1957) |
| Lives in Hiroshima |
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| Masato Kobayashi 'Starry Paint' |
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| Thomas Caron |
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The oeuvre of Masato Kobayashi unites the two dimensionality of painting with installation art and performance. Through a corporal struggle with the canvas he tries to breach the traditional borders that put restraint on the pictural surface. Kobayashi rejects the conventional definition of painting as a total of colours, layered upon a support, which offer a window upon the world.
His works needs to be seen as indivisible entities that nullify the duality between support and paint. Hence his painterly medium doesn’t exist of the traditional ‘oil on canvas’, but of ‘oil with canvas’. Consequently Kobayashi starting point isn’t a stretched canvas, as such predirected form and size would condition the end result too much. Subsequently his work is born out of the gradual unification of paint, canvas and frame. In this process Kobayashi isn’t so much a creative artist as he is a transparent medium. This was already perceptible in his “Son of Painting” series and is even more manifest in his “Starry Paint” series.
In the Starry Paintings, Kobayashi functions as medium for the starlight. His work materializes their invisible energy, which takes the shape of female nudes. These women lay with their backs to the onlooker, their gaze aimed at the stars. Even though they don’t show any interest in the spectator, at the same time their invisible gaze takes these spectators on a voyage of discovery to where they come from, a place beyond the humane that overarches our whole existence.
Kobayashi points out the temporality and the changeability of the reality that surrounds us. Everything changes under influence of light, as does Kobayashis work. Consequently these women are only coincidental manifestations of such energy.
Some of the shown works are accompanied by a paint tube. Such tubes function as a source for endless revitalization, a battery that again and again saves and passes on the starry energy.
For this reason the work Kobayashi produces is never a static end product but always a fluctuating materialization of an all surrounding energy that takes place before the eye of the onlooker.
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