Friday, April 29, 2005
Art In Review
Ken Johnson

The four artists showing here work at Atelier Incurve, a vocational training facility in Osaka, Japan, dedicated to supporting artistically talented, mentally disabled people. As is often the case with the best so-called outsider artists, all four seem possessed by naive but extraordinarily intense imaginations and driven by formal predilections so focused as to border on compulsive.

Featured in the main gallery is Terao Katsuhiro, the oldest — he was born in 1960 — and most accomplished of the group. He works mainly at welding metal sculptures, but here he is represented by works on paper in various media, including pencil, scratchboard, etching, collage and acrylic paint. He fills small and large pages with all-over, hyper-active patterns of beams and girders, achieving a rousing wedding of architectural fantasy and visually gripping abstraction.

The three artists downstairs are represented by smaller selections. Yumoto Mitsuo (b. 1978) draws richly hued, semi-abstract representations of toys and archaeological objects, using colored pencil and crayon on colored sheets of cardboard. Yoshimune Kazuhiro (b. 1984) uses felt-tip pens to create colorful, diagrammatic compositions of boxed-in numbers, and he also paints comically simplified copies of people in magazines.

Shinki Tomoyuki uses a computer to compose wildly distorted but finely detailed cartoon images of professional wrestlers in action. His prints call to mind classical Japanese woodcuts or works by the Chicago Imagists Karl Wirsum and Jim Nutt.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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