Original Landscape of Salvation #3
Osamu Fukano“nontitle” oil on canvas 1160x915mm

3
After the mid-1950s, Kenichiro Terada's painting style entered the world of informel (nonfigurative).
He got married and returned to Fukuoka from Tokyo in 1957. His base of operations wasYakuin Atelier.
It was in an art magazine that he came to know the American painter Jackson Pollock.
He told me several times, "That was the turning point for me to move from figurative painting toabstract expression.

"My paintings are called abstract abstractions, but to me they are figurative.”
he added.

Jackson Pollock had a profound impact on young Japanese painters. Pollock removed thecanvas from the easel. When a canvas is painted on an easel, there is an elasticity between thecanvas and the paintbrush. He would avoid this elasticity, spread the canvas directly on the wallor floor, and use the hard resistance of the surface to paint.

He walks around the canvas and paints from anywhere. Therefore, there is no specific center ororderly composition. The corners and the center of a large canvas have the same meaning.
Structural order, such as top or bottom, right or left, is ignored. The paint is mixed, dripped, andsplattered. It is fluid and intricate.

There is no way to answer the question often asked, "What are you painting?
Pollock's work was "emotionally expressive, emphasizing the act of painting rather than thework itself, an appealing form of expression that had not existed until now. Terada was also
obsessed with this. The wild and violent style of painting that began with Pollock was called "hotabstraction," and was named "unformel (non-figurative)" because it did not capture a definiteform.

Why did Kenichiro Terada, who learned sometimes too severe restraint from Kenshi Ito, leap
into this chaos of informel?

The drawing method, without order or structure, is at least

superficially far removed from the lyricism of restraint and control.
This is where Terada leapt.

As he himself has stated, he was exposed to the world of Jackson Pollock, but there was also agroup of young avant-garde painters called "Kyushu-Ha" which at the time was showing off its
scandalous forward-thrusting power.

Takami Sakurai, Mokuma Kikuhata, Osamu Ochi, Mitsuko Tabe, and others, almost all in their
20s, were young artists of Dadaist descent in terms of artistic thought, sharply rebelling against
the authority of the established art world, and rampaging about in complete disregard ofconventional techniques and concepts. The presentation in Tokyo, which was carefully plannedat the time to advance their careers, was a joke to everyone at Kyushu-Ha, as if a troupe had
suddenly arrived.

“Young painters, like insects in a corner of the countryside, enter into the pseudo-collusion
between society and pictorial expression. They expose it one by one in concrete terms. In otherwords, while developing a new and extremely harsh theory of expression, they attack the worldof Japanese painting, with Tokyo culture at the top of the heap. This was an unprecedentedevent for the art world in Kyushu, which had long been a child of Tokyo" (Mokuma Kikuhata,"My Postwar Years").

Kenichiro Terada also joined "Kyushu-Ha".
For Terada, most of the members of "Kyushu-Ha" were younger than him, with the exception ofSakurai. In terms of painting history, Terada was regarded as a hope among the Nika exhibitors
living in Kyushu, along with Fukuoka's Yohji Kuroki and Chikugo's Koji Koga. Therefore, Terada
did not approach Kyushu-Ha" in any way. In the beginning, there were circumstances that camefrom personal connections.

Kyushu-Ha" began in 1956 with a street exhibition (persona exhibition) held in the wall facing
the street of the former Fukuoka Prefectural Office. Its main organizers were Takami Sakurai,
Yohji Kuroki of the Nika Department, and poets Mamoru Matano and Sohei Suzuki. Kuroki, likeTerada, had exhibited at Nika, and Suzuki and Terada, both poets, lived within a five-minute
walk of each other and were friends. Mokuma Kikuhata, who has emerged as a prominent
figure in "Kyushu-Ha", was also a young friend who used to ask Terada for critiques. Kikuhata,
who was in his teens, went to "House of Blue" a studio that Terada had set up in the city with afriend before moving to Tokyo, to ask for a critique of his work.

When Terada was exposed to the group's activities at the invitation of these friends, somethingburst within him. According to Terada's recollection, "I had only known artists who had retained
their prewar artistic temperament, so it was refreshing to see younger group members creating'works' as they pleased, and I began painting abstract-like works with some trepidation.“.

Phenomenologically, Kyushu-Ha was a "rambunctious" group. However, it had the essence ofactivities that questioned what painting is in a very subtle way.

This is the testimony of Takami Sakurai.
“I knew very well that I had no talent for painting, so I made the hypothesis that anyone canpaint. Now that I have put it up, I have to prove it. There was a woman who was a musician anda college alumna. I encouraged her to complete her first oil painting in one week and entered itin the prefectural exhibition. It was accepted and was critiqued. Those who had been
unsuccessful soon began to be selected. At that time, I was deeply confronted with the questionof what painting is. The question of what painting is always haunted me, and I ended up doing
all kinds of things that were not even painting.”

“It was a time when everything was a painting! or Technique!. The materials available were coaltar, pitch, sand, cement, plaster, and anything else one could think of. We were happy as longas it stuck, or if it didn't, we nailed it or tied it with string. Sometimes it would get done, andsometimes it would fall apart in the process. Some put an iron pipe in the center hole of a cartire, connected it with a wire mesh, and then hardened the inside of it with concrete, which wasthen fixed to a board frame. We attached the pan to the glass window with pitch, filled the restwith plaster, drilled a hole just above the pan, and let it rot naturally with a little water. The rest
was a brownish square hollow. That is the kind of works.”

Here was a world apart from the painter's path of restraint and devotion. It was liberation andexplosion. There was a freedom of expression that was not bound by form.

And Kenichiro

Terada encountered it. With "Kyushu-Ha" as a familiar entity and Pollock as information as acatalyst, Terada's informel period began.

Numerous essays recounting memories of Kenichiro Terada convey the bright side of the manknown as Mr. Teraken. However, in the 1950s, he had a crushing pain that he did not show toothers. He is the eldest of eight siblings. After his father became ill and died, he dropped out ofcollege and worked for a company for a year. Moved to Tokyo, battled the disease. Married,
returned to his hometown. Although he was selected for the Nika Prize at the young age of 20,
he did not receive any training in the art school system.

He had responsibilities as the eldest

son of a family that had lost his father. In addition, there were the technical and social quotas for
Nika's advancement. It was a time when he struggled with the pressure of responsibilities hehad to assume and expectations he had to meet.

The freedom to express himself outside of conventional frameworks must have given Kenichiro
Terada an open and airy feeling as a painter.
By "an expression that emphasizes the act of painting rather than the work itself," he was able
to free his spirit from the oppression of the painting method.

In 1959, Terada received a long-sought special prize at Nika.
However, as I confirm from the works of the time that remain in his studio from his days atYakuin, the style of his paintings is dark and depressing. I felt the style was more like Jean
Dubuffet's subdued and hard paintings than Pollock's openness.

For example, the work "1961-11" is a hard-toned screen with a dark green base, a mixture ofgray and dark brown, and thick but short milky lines. The matière, formed from the "act itself" ofpainting automatically, as if in the throes of emotion, is somber and dark, as if reflecting histrapped individuality and the circumstances surrounding it at the time. It seems that Kenichiro
Terada's paintings at that time were not so much works of art as mental activities of selfsalvation to endure pressure pains.

He left "Kyushu-Ha" after two years. Kenichiro Terada found a place for free expression there.
Kyushu-Ha continued to question him about his membership in the established Nika-kai.
Kenichiro Terada torn apart. Later, when he left the Nika-kai, Terada burned a huge amount of
his own work. Most of them were created around 1960. It is not that he erased his own
trajectory as a work of art, but that the inner pain he was trapped in at that time was unbearable
for him, even as a memory. Perhaps shaking something off with this incineration, Kenichiro
Terada eventually entered the age of colorism with its rich color palette.