Sadaharu Horio

A book by Axel Vervoordt on one of Japan's most prominent avant-garde Gutai artists. Sadaharu Horio, born in 1939 in Kobe, is a third-generation Gutai artist and a pioneer in modern Kobe performance art. He plucks various found objects-including household objects, string, bits of wood, branches, roots, planks, crates, boxes, stones, and a leather bag-in order to use them as surfaces on which to paint, it is not a matter of raising the banal to the level of an artwork. What he does also has little to do with the ritual of an ever-repeating practice. Every day, regardless of what is happening around him, or whether the earth may be trembling, he applies paint to the objects. To avoid making the choice of color himself, he sticks to the sequence of colors in the paint box. He thereby avoids everything that is connected with subjectivity. By always branding diverse objects in the same manner, he unites them into one whole. The paint is the link between mankind and the movements of the cosmos. Instead of portraying his own lifetime, it is the infinitude of time that is so wonderfully revealed here.
Atsuo Yamamoto, curator of The Museum of Modern Art in Shiga (Japan) describes Horio’s work as follows: "The idea of creating so many drawings are connected to the issue of life and time. All his works are done under the one theme, to make "invisible" into visible. He always tries to grasp air (emptiness) or time, so essential for human-beings but hard to recognize. So many drawings are visualize of time (his life), so his sign with date is conceptually very important."