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Dissolving Horizons

GOCA by Garde（May 2026, New York）

Many as One:
Tectonics of Painting

GOCA by Garde Curator
Kenta Ichinose

By the middle of the twentieth century, New York had reset the very gravity of pictorial history. Jackson Pollock’s all-over drip paintings, Barnett Newman’s sublime color fields, and Helen Frankenthaler’s soak-stain technique together dismantled the figure-ground hierarchy that had governed Western painting since the Renaissance. Within the formalist discourse most fully articulated by Clement Greenberg, these works came to be positioned as the apogee of painting’s liberation from representation—an arrival at pure flatness and the autonomy of the medium. And yet, viewed historically, that culmination was also one extreme of a dualistic tension peculiar to monotheistic cultures: an absolute self set against a world it confronts.

In response to this historical proposition, the painter Mitsumasa Kadota—who has, for more than two decades, persistently extended the limits of painting—answers from an entirely different vector, grounded in an Eastern spiritual sensibility and a singular embodied practice. What most distinguishes Kadota’s painting is the absence of any boundary cleaving “self” from “other,” or “human” from “nature.” His work proceeds from a Japanese polytheistic—indeed animistic—sensibility, in which all things are interlinked and divinity dwells everywhere, without partition. It is this non-dualistic perspective that drives, at its very root, the “dissolution of figure and ground” enacted on his canvas. At the same time, Kadota draws upon natural science and mathematical thought as equally vital clues toward truth, sustaining throughout his practice a stance that traverses multiple intellectual lineages rather than enclosing itself within Eastern intuition alone. It is precisely this layered inquiry that has continually propelled him to extend the limits of pictorial expression.

This proposition has been viscerally materialized through Kadota’s process itself. Beginning with stain technique in his early years, he eventually arrived at his own embodied method: mixing foreign substances—carborundum (an industrial abrasive), sand—into acrylic paint, then “excavating” the heavily layered surface with palette knives and squeegees. A stroke once laid down is overlaid by another that effaces it. Painting and erasing, accumulation and detachment, are integrated into a single gesture—one that summons forth, as the very body of painting, the order of nature in which decay and emergence ceaselessly intermingle. The picture plane is no longer a smooth “painting surface”; it emerges, rather, as a material field bearing the gravity of geological strata.

Out of this strenuous corporeal labor, the “figure” on the surface loses its centripetal force, and a luxuriant space arises in which figure and ground are no longer separable. Kadota calls this state the “Gray Zone”—and in 2010 he held a solo exhibition under that very title, “GRAY ZONE,” confirming its place as a fundamental basso continuo throughout his practice. Yet this is by no means a uniform gray of compromise. Rather, it designates a near-miraculous coexistence in which sensuous hues—scarlet, cobalt, emerald, lemon yellow—violently intersect across the surface and yet refuse to exclude one another. As one collector remarked, standing before one of Kadota’s paintings: “It is polychromatic, and yet it appears as a single chromatic whole.” Multiplicity and unity are realized at once; countless differences are gathered into a single breath. This paradoxical visual experience lies at the very heart of Kadota’s chromatic world—the very territory toward which his “Gray Zone” is ultimately directed.

Whereas American Abstract Expressionism converged toward the purity of the medium and toward opticality, Kadota’s painting moves in the opposite direction. The matter grows ever heavier, ever more visceral; the trace of the painter’s bodily labor is never concealed. The undulations of dense pigment and the friction of color against color are, at once, an accumulation of the artist’s own personal memories and emotions—translated into hue and brushstroke, an inner stratum laid down day by day, as in a diary—and a visualization of the dilemmas that haunt contemporary society: division, intolerance, the fractures of our time. And yet, beneath this torrent there persists a stillness akin to the circulation of qi in Eastern thought. Kadota does not resist the overwhelming energies of nature; rather, he routes them through his own body, sublimating them into the very structure of painting.

If what Pollock released onto the canvas was the unconscious, then what Kadota excavates is the web of relations immanent in the world itself. His painting calls into question the separation of seer and seen that modern painting has long presupposed; in its stead, he proposes a mode of perception in which both tremble together within a single field, generating one another. It is at once a critique of Abstract Expressionism and a profound act of homage to its legacy.

Mitsumasa Kadota receives the lineage of Western modernism—the legacy of Abstract Expressionism—head on, and, from the perspective of Eastern polytheism and non-dualism, as well as from multiple horizons of knowledge that encompass natural science and mathematics, he proposes a renewed possibility for abstract painting itself. His paintings belong to none of these poles—figure and ground, East and West, past and future, reason and intuition—and yet they hold all of them within. They are an open door, drawing the viewer beyond the horizon of dualism.