PWP35 Young Leaves PWP35　若葉

The title of this work, which features straight lines and curves created by eight wooden boxes of varying depth, means that it is the 35th work in the "Practice Wood Painting" series and nicknamed "Young Leaves." The texture of the wood shows through the painted geometric patterns reminiscent of leaves. Hikosaka purposely avoided the surface uniformity of paper or canvas and chose wood for the way it holds paints and its visual impact as a support material. For him, this is a painting and not a sculpture. In his early works in wood, boards painted in light colors were arranged so that their respective length reflected the 5-7-5-7-7 pattern of the number of syllables per line in a Japanese tanaka poem. An example is "Practice Wood Painting PWP6" (1977, Collection of this museum). He then started to use thicker boards and, eventually, wooden boxes, arranging them into a comb-like shape, while his colors acquired more depth. Having made his debut in the early 1970s, Hikosaka had first to find a way to break past the "Mono-ha" and Conceptual Art. He chose "practice" as his means for this task and attempted to bring about the revival of colors and shapes.