Toru Otani

Number and arrangement (snakes, flowers and poppy seed pods)

2024

Silkscreen print on sandpaper

28 x 23 cm

Edition of 12 copies (all unique) numbered and signed by the artist on a certificate, plus 2 Artist’s Proofs

Price

€0.00

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The edition

This edition consists of a series of twelve unique pieces produced on the backside of sheets of sandpaper, one of Toru Otani’s iconic materials. Each of the works features motives that are also representative of the artist’s visual universe: a snake, a flower, and a poppy pod, highly stylized elements that suggest mythological, dreamlike, or hallucinatory narratives.

They appear in different configurations, depending on the random distribution of the readymade marks on each sheet of the sandpaper. The rest of the surface is otherwise left raw, as if in the process of being covered.

More than just formal variations on a theme, the ensemble offers a valuable insight into the artist’s working process, into how he takes advantage of the singularity of each medium. In short, into how a work can emerge from the material itself, seemingly on its own.

The artist

Toru Otani was born in 1988 in Kanagawa. He currently lives in Tokyo.

The medium of Toru Otani’s work is found materials. Through internet auctions or random encounters, the artist collects cigarette wrappers, sandpaper, postcards, notebooks, and leaflets, which serve as a canvas for his carefully crafted compositions in colored pencil. Pre-existing graphic elements (logos, indications, or traces of prior use) are concealed or revealed, isolated or connected to form an enigmatic composition, similar to an unsolvable rebus.

A series of elements appear recurrently throughout his work as haunting symbols or archetypes that each time find new media and new strategies to manifest themselves. In Freud’s description of the mechanics of dreams, our latent thoughts are subject to processes of displacement and condensation, taking the form of hieroglyphs to be translated. This perhaps best describes the fascination that Otani’s body of work exerts on us.

His work is represented by XYZ Collective (Tokyo).

The exhibition