Horiki. At the cost of taking a long, winding road

Questo libro, prezioso per chi ha conosciuto Horiki Katsutomi di persona ma anche per chi conosce solo la sua pittura e, aggiungiamo, per chi ama la pittura in generale, non parla in senso esclusivo della pratica artistica di Horiki e dei suoi riferimenti tipologici o meglio, parla della sua pittura ma attraverso l’occhio di chi lo ha vissuto intimamente, da vicino, ascoltandone il respiro umano, i silenzi e le parole, componendo, in queste pagine dense, una biografia sentimentale e soprattutto un’interessante lettura simbologico-poetica del suo fare.

Horiki was suspended between two very different, almost opposing, worlds. “Horiki was a deeply Japanese man”, Erminia Ardissino told me on the first day I entered the artist’s studio in a beautiful farmhouse in the Piedmont countryside in Cigliano, where he had settled in 1995 and found new artistic vigor (the “Odyssey” cycle).

Being Japanese was inherent to Horiki’s deepest being, even if he did not make it an existential rule and had physically abandoned the customs and values that nevertheless inevitably entered his daily life. He lived with a genetic legacy as a noble descendant of an ancient line of samurai, despite his desire to experience other cultures like that of Italy. Artist and man remained, until the end, suspended in tension between two worlds: Japan and Italy, East and West, Zen and Christianity. Their cultures and moral systems somehow remained distinct but were nevertheless amalgamated in his art, by the action of his painting in which it is possible to recognize a subtle, interesting, and notably unprecedented, fusion between Gutai and Italian Informal art. It is an artistic journey that through the newly founded “Horiki Katzutomi Archive”, the curator (i.e. the writer) and the artist’s family will try to protect and share.

“Horiki would stand isolated in his studio, and then sometimes sit in a chair and contemplate the light and the tree in the garden”, Erminia’s granddaughter recounts. His was a slow doing, full of pauses. I like to imagine the painter’s mind wandering, interrupting his brushwork. Perhaps he suddenly looked out the window, seeking the un-doing of conscious meditation or letting feelings (often images of the past, but also of a good book, of a moment of conviviality), turn into melancholic suggestions, so letting everything flow and carrying it who-knows-where into the symbolic imagery that was his continually transcendent cosmos. Michikusa wo kū, means literally “eating grass by the side of the road” - again we seek the context of the Japanese language - i.e. wandering aimlessly, stopping to let the horse eat and, in that pause, discovering the truth of “something” in the landscape that is not preordained by the intended destination, but revelatory of a new truth. Nature and the landscape (which is its “optical theater”) conceals the truth of all things in Mahayana Buddhism. Through his travels Horiki searched for impressions that would point him to that path, which unfolded as he went, until it revealed his landing place to him.
All parts of the physical world, movable and immovable, are occasions for spiritual elevation in ancient Japanese Zen culture. Things are for going beyond themselves, with the purpose of creating other things that represent the product of a state of exact balance between the one who makes them and the matter from which they are made. In this process, everything is part of a single organism subject to the continuous dynamic of the transition between before and after, between beginning and end. It is the great, terrible and splendid game of Time.

Insomma, nel caso di Katsutomi la pittura è “fisicamente” un prodotto di meditazione e azione con un fine evidente di narrazione poetica che utilizzi il simbolo come strumento dialogico, per esempio come nei cicli mitici di “Ulisse” in cui appare la barca, sintetizzata in forma di nuvola, vaporizzazione cromatica dell’incorporeo immaginifico del viaggio, scoperta e viatico esistenziale di un oltre misterioso e irraggiungibile che alla fine è il luogo dell’anima e anche quello della coscienza, oppure come nelle serie di “Ogigia” e “Calypso” nelle quali le forme si fanno ambiguamente femminine, richiamando un approdo fisico tentatore ma anche primigenio; e poi le intense campiture dalle cromie profonde che espandono sulla tela un tutto categorico vagamente rothkiano (il ciclo “Ithaca” e l’opera “Verso Ade” del 1999 qui pubblicata) che Elena Pontiggia assimila a “velature metafisiche”, che si trasformano in cieli, oceani, paesaggi immaginifici ma anche distese di amniotici orizzonti. In questo fare vi è l’evidenza di percepire nel profondo il momento creativo, distaccando la coscienza dalla fisicità attraverso la percezione del vuoto interiore che è il “mu-shin”, che annulla il “pensiero del fare” all’interno dell’azione del fare ovvero la prassi. Una condizione capace di tradurre la volontà in uno stato di perfetta armonia che riveli l’essenza della materia. E questo senso dell’attesa e della solitudine contemplativa probabilmente hanno favorito una pratica lenta, motivo di una produzione esigua eppure di grandissima qualità esecutiva e compositiva.

Horiki is in search of self and the true meaning of existence. “I seek a universal language to speak to myself and with others”, he says. In fact he investigates, as a painter, the moments when light, nature (in a universal sense), and thought/idea trigger in him and the viewer the awareness of the balance that is a necessary condition for approaching the “revelation of the All”. Somehow faith in a Catholic God, – a God he accepted by transcendence and not immanence - that being in perfect balance in itself which resolves everything, and the mu-shin of the Zen discipline that seeks in the “thought-zero” non-resolution of things the state of balance, identify the spiritual path of the painter. The sense of material pigment, constructed with painstaking and patient expenditure of time, as a constructive action that has the mantra-like valence of absolute concentration, lingers in the signs of great rigor and commitment to producing technically impeccable works.
And then there are the formal references within Horiki’s works, alluding to art historical models and symbols, absorbed during studies at the Academy. We must remember, in order to understand his world, that Horiki had a background with (inevitably) deep roots in Buddhist metaphysics, ordered according to the unambiguous discipline of Zen thought and the ganbaru practice that teaches commitment and determination – stubbornness’ – in doing. He also had, however, a formative immersion in the typological world and patterns of Western culture, made up of continuous aesthetic reshuffles, refluxes, translations and formal re-compositions, born of the classical matrix first, and the medieval primitive later. He loved Western art, loved Piero della Francesca, loved Romanesque and Gothic churches, loved Sironi’s Novecento and Morandi’s chromatic-luminous synthesis, but also World War II Italian art, both figurative and abstract. In his works he approaches composition through symbolic-architectural articulations, as in the religious cycle “Cycle of the True Cross”, before straying into the informality, with Fautrierian echoes, of the “Ulysses” and “Ithaca” series, crystallized by a sense of order and calm that is certainly not derived from Italian abstract expressionism.

“To understand my being (...) to compare and correct my course. Even at the cost of taking a long winding road”. So said Horiki of his journey as a man and as an artist; an exploratory journey into places and encounters, readings and confrontations, along with the precious few friendships he maintained. A journey of kaizen, of “ameliorative change,” in search of the unexpected and with a continuing awareness of death, which he called the “moment of probability” that life contains from the beginning. Death for Horiki was a moment of passage and a “probable” event because it was part of the flow of life; death was part of living and the varied randomness it contains. In this palingenetic light Buddhism (as opposed to Shinto) appears close to Christianity, in that it provides for a similar transition from physical life to a higher dimension/state, thereby illustrating the mystery that human beings must accept as a normal eventuality. “The blackness grows blacker and blacker. The world of the dead is full of life, but past, so it is black, pervaded with regret, filled with longing for missing affections”, Erminia Ardissino writes.

Nella pratica di Katsutomi Horiki, tutto è attesa di verità attraverso la luce e il colore (la forma esiste per loro concorso); segnali ottici che trasformano la realtà in poesia e dunque nella verità delle cose che, oltre la materia, descrive il senso profondo della vita.

Inevitabile leggere i suoi cicli pittorici secondo la tipica griglia tipologica dell’analisi estetica, ma bisogna considerare che i suoi passaggi figurativi e informali sono solo la forma di una narrazione poetica che sorregge l’intero impianto; più ancora va considerato l’intento generale di un artista che univa due universi in un unico momento, legandoli con un atteggiamento lirico e sentimentale dal timbro simbolista. Egli era per prima cosa un narratore, o meglio un poeta, alla ricerca della più intima verità, la sua.

Alberto Barranco di Valdivieso
Direttore e curatore dell’Archivio Horiki Katsutomi