Dynamism of Imagination – Artist Kenichiro Terada's World Yukito Tanaka
A picture is a mere flat material, but it has infinite possibilities of transformation andpotentiality. It is a strange thing. The fact that a picture is interesting or excellent is not only
because of the pleasure of "seeing and feeling" it with the naked eye. It is also because there
is another kind of feeling of "reading and feeling”. The greater the volume of "reading andfeeling," the more fun and delightful the picture will be.
I am not the only one who has been looking at Kenichiro Terada's paintings for a long timeand always found them strangely fresh. What I found fresh about his paintings was theirfullness, their elasticity, or their fertility.
Every person has an unspoken mental dynamism in his or her conscious mind.
What people have inherited from long ago in history, including the history of painting, isneither history expressed in language nor anything else. It is a tradition that resonates withthe very physiological, subconscious dynamism of each and every one of the people, andhas been handed down as a tradition, not as knowledge or logic. This is especially true inthe case of painting.
We can call the subconscious dynamism "imagery" in the Western style, or we can call it
imagination. The tradition of painting or the "true nature" of art history is, surprisingly, such asimple thing. We have not inherited a picture in a frame, but have taken root in the flow ofimagery, the primordial flutter of the imagination.
When I feel pictures like that, Terada's paintings, for example, excite me to see them to thepoint of disgust. How in the world do the images that he keeps in stock in his consciousness
generate and develop? Because the paintings have a very physiological aspect, the dynamicof the uncluttered imagery resonates with the viewer's intuition in a simple way. Sometimes
I see people looking at his paintings and murmuring, "I don't understand abstract painting.
However, I am convinced that Mr. Terada's paintings are rather very concrete, although they
are filled with abstract elements.
In Mr. Terada's paintings, masses of blue, red, purple, and pink swarm around without reserve.
Or, rather, they appear and disappear. The way they appear and disappear is very

physiological, and at times they seem to shape the landscape, and at other times I feel as if
they are an expansion of the botanical wonder of "sprouting seeds". It is possible tosuperimpose the erotic energy of the women on the dynamism of their "thickness". And withthe paintings, I find myself swaying in some far-reaching nature, such as the space-timeprocess of the creation of a single universe. Perhaps he is resuscitating the invisible bybreathing color, form, and movement into the unconscious landscape, the subconsciousimagery.
One major characteristic of Terada's paintings is color. Matisse, for example, used thereceding color yellow for the shadows and replaced the front part with the advancing colors
red and blue, but in Terada's case, all colors are treated equally. While each color has its ownfunction, it is a strange symbolic language. That is why the "temptation to read" is even more
fascinating. Often, he uses a surprisingly bold line to delineate the picture plane, bringing
another image into the picture. This is not because of the so-called "composition of the picture.
He must be trying to generate something by colliding separate and completely different
psychological scenes. At such times, I feel the spaciousness of the painting and involuntarily
murmur, "Hmmm, it's so spacious.