Press Release

SHINYA AZUMAYOROSHIKU 夜露死苦
2 April – 6 May 2024
Galerie Marguo, 4 rue des Minimes, 75003 Paris

Galerie Marguo is pleased to announce the forthcoming exhibition YOROSHIKU 夜露死苦, anexhibition by Japanese artist Shinya Azuma. Opening on 2 April and on view through 11 May 2024,
this exhibition marks Azuma’s first solo show in Europe and with the gallery.
Featuring a suite of new paintings and wooden sculptures, the exhibition continues Shinya Azuma’sexploration into the disorienting, desensitizing, and sometimes absurd reality of living in an endlessly
connected world, mediated by screens and simultaneous virtual realities.
Born in the 1990s, Azuma is part of the hinge generation that grew up alongside the internet but still
remembers a time before its total ubiquity. His practice probes the juxtaposition and tensions between
the material and virtual, the particular and general, and the flattened hierarchy of images that sets
depictions of violence and global tragedy alongside viral memes and puerile banality. Azuma culls hissubjects from social media, video games, the news, as well as his own imagination and surroundings,
rendering his compositions as drawings reminiscent of a dream journal before translating the selected
sketches into paintings, shifting his focus to the creation of volumes and forms. Citing painters suchas Pierre Bonnard and Philip Guston, who worked fluidly between abstraction and illustrative
figuration, Azuma’s application of pigment shifts between coarse brush strokes that only partially coatthe surface and thick impasto, lending a strange materiality to the works evocative of the somatic
experience of straddling the tangible and virtual.
Ranging in scale from medium formats to canvases over two meters long, these brightly coloredtableaux unfurl like comic strips, or memes themselves, inducting us into a world of rogue humanoidcharacters careening down roads, dragging poor victims by the hair, or brandishing medieval weapons.
Humorous and at times self-deprecating, Azuma’s subjects seem perpetually propelled in motion,
imbuing the paintings with the blurred effect of endless scrolling, further and further down the feed.
Indeed, screens and canvases become analogous in Azuma’s visual language, the voyeurism of social
media captured by the windows that populate so many of these worlds, such as in Social Destroyer,Snoopys, or Flower Cutter (all 2024). The blurriness is also indicative of a certain ambivalence orambiguity in Azuma’s works, which is further amplified by the symbolism of fire – an element, ortechnology that is both generative and destructive. Despite the cartoonish pathos that emanates fromthese characters, Azuma’s faces remain anonymous. His illustrated and sculptural figures elide
defined features, avoiding specificity to address more universal human experiences, impulses, desiresand behaviors.
At certain moments, the pursuit of ambiguity in Azuma’s works – as any judgement of our hyperaccelerated cybernetic reality is notably absent – lends itself to a haunting and oneiric impressionism.
The more intimately sized portraits Snow Day, Limbo, and Trivial Resistance conjure some type of
purgatorial psychological state. In the latter, background and foreground meld into a mottled blueanthracite fog, undergirded by deep red tones. From the center of the canvas the ghostly apparitionof a figure emerges holding a stem engulfed in flames, the suggestion of a chain clasped onto its
ankle shackles it to the surrounding ether. Individuality and surroundings are challenged, madeporous, raising age-old existential questions about human essence and individuality, in the context ofalgorithmic and networked systems that increasingly shape our desires, emotions, and senses of self.
As the artist expressed in an interview, ‘Although I say that I am my ultimate self, I don't actually exist,
but I am created by the environment around me, the environments that make me.’
About the artist
Born in Osaka in 1994 where he still lives, Shinya Azuma is a Japanese artist who works in Kyoto, Japan. He holds a
master’s degree in Contemporary Art from the Kyoto University of Art and Design. Azuma makes a sketch of images
inspired by the news programs or sceneries in daily life through his experience and remakes them on canvas with boldbrush strokes. Azuma’s simple paintings with peculiar color usage and dynamic texture of the medium have quirkinesssomehow, and vigor which stops us to see the picture.
The themes of the works range from some well-timed serious issues such as wealth inequality or protests, to personalsexual experiences, but they all capture various aspects of humanity. Like memes on social media, the distinctive typeof humor which can be both satire and self-deprecating sarcasm is one of the attractions of his works. From 2021, hehas started to create sculpture made of wood and ceramics, expanding his range of expression beyond twodimensional works.
Azuma's works have attracted the attention of collectors and art professionals in Japan as early as when he was agraduate student. His recent solo exhibitions include: ‘Shame: Inevitable Man,’ COHJU contemporary art (Kyoto, JP2022); ‘Throw a knuckleball from the jungle,’ EUKARYOTE (Tokyo, JP 2021); ‘Joint technique,’ Seibu Shibuya Art
Gallery (Tokyo, JP 2020); and ‘Human. Human? Human!,’ COHJU contemporary art (Kyoto, JP 2020). Azuma’s
work is held in the Takahashi Ryutaro Collection, Japan, sequence MIYASHITA PARK, Japan and Toyota Municipal
Museum of Art, Japan.
Press Inquiries

Copyright et Courtesy Credits

Maud Cartronmaud@marguo.com+33 7 66 14 91 25

Courtesy of the Artist and Galerie Marguo#ShinyaAzuma#ShinyaAzumaParis#YOROSHIKU #夜露死苦@galeriemarguo
marguo.com

Shinya Azuma
Snoopys, 2024
Oil on canvas
162 x 130.3 cm (63 3/4 x 51 1/4 in)