Goro Murayama solo exhibition “Painting Folding”@ Takuro Someya Contemporary Art (TSCA, Tokyo)
Review for BT by Yukiko Shikata [4 Feb, 2021]!

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Installation view: Left, Painting folding – Regard This as a Key to Hypothesize a Door That It Would Open (2020),
Center, Painting folding – Conceive a Body that is in Accordance With This (2020)!
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A ceaseless process of differentiation that erupted in the pandemic!
©Goro Murayama / Photo by Shu Nakagawa / Courtesy of Takuro Someya Contemporary Art

Entering the exhibition space, one is confronted with Conceive a Body that is in Accordance With This, the work that holds the key to the entire exhibition. The “woven paintings"
based on the concept of autopoiesis that Murayama has been creating since 2008 havegrown into unprecedently multilayered three-dimensional helix structures, with a protruding
end seemingly piercing into another dimension. Part of this tip droops and hangs over a
printed 3D simulation image.

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Murayama has drawn inspiration from simulation in science where lifelike behavior is generated based on the rules of cellular automata, coining the expression “simulationalpoiesis” to refer to his works in contraposition to scientific simulation. In this work, the twocome together for the first time, forming a kind of hybrid body encapsulating strong contrasts.
The title of this exhibition derives from protein folding, a biological model where one-dimensional amino acid sequences are developed into three-dimensional helix structures.
The woven painting and the scientific image share their regard for the three-dimensional
as well as the helix structure that occurs in nature.

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Painting folding – Conceive a Body that is in Accordance With This (2020)
Acrylic on woven hemp string, 200x160x30cm, reference image.

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©Goro Murayama / Photo by Shu Nakagawa / Courtesy of Takuro Someya Contemporary Art

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The helix could be described as a dynamic flow in which various patterns and structures
are created a posteriori.
By introducing self-organizing rules, the woven paintings assume a series of processes
where two-dimensional supports are generated by hand from strings to then be painted
over. The support is thus a series of traces that lead from one dimension to two and three
dimensions. The image is a simulation of the three-dimensional structure of the Covid-19
spike proteins (the main target of the antibody), showing the way in which the helix is entangled. The woven painting in this work is achieved by Murayama incorporating this generation process as a rule. Regard This as a Key to Hypothesize a Door That It Would
Open positioned to the left of it takes as its motif ACE2 proteins*, the receptor that binds tothe Covid-19 spike proteins, which form the "matching body" corresponding to the work.

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The pandemic that has engulfed the world since 2020 has
had a profound impact on politics and economics, on society,and even on people’s physicaland mental health. Cuttingedge life sciences and information and communication
technologies promote information gathering and analysis,
simulation, and medical treatment, but we are faced, at thesame time, with the limitationsof modern systems (includingmodern science). Viruses that
repeatedly mutate (including
COVID-19) are a threat to human beings, but now that there
is an understanding that genes
originate from organisms (including humans) and that eightpercent of the human genome
has been introduced from theoutside via retroviruses, the relationship between humans andviruses must also be reinterpreted from the perspective ofcommunication.

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Painting folding - Regard This as a Key to Hypothesize a Door That It Would Open (2020)
Acrylic on woven hemp string, 140x160x25cm, reference Image.
©Goro Murayama / Photo by Shu Nakagawa / Courtesy of Takuro Someya Contemporary Art

Behind the timeliness of his reaction to the pandemic, there lies Murayama’s long-standing
contemplation and practice regarding the loosening ends of the progress of modern science, namely the notion of objective observation reaching its limits, as well as the possibility of emergence through autopoiesis. Murayama creates his works following a set of rules.
The process, however, induces reciprocal metamorphoses and leapfrogging in both thework and the artist due to the encounter with unexpected situations caused not only bymisalignments and errors, but also by the peculiar materialities of the materials and theartist’s own physical and emotional fluctuations. Murayama says that when producing hisworks, he alternately experiences the internal behavior of the system and the gaze of anoutside observer. To explore the possibilities of a science of emergence that overcomesmodern science through art—what Murayama aims to achieve is a creative turn that goesbeyond the existing boundaries of science and art to find a new way that the two can work
together.

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Voderberg Tiling Drawing (2020)
Acrylic on paper, cutting plotter, 160x205cm!

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©Goro Murayama / Photo by Shu Nakagawa / Courtesy of Takuro Someya Contemporary Art

The above-mentioned three-dimensionalization with helix structures can also be seen in“Tiling Drawing” that applies Voderberg's mathematical spiral tiling. The work brings thebinding of multiple units of a protein into a four-dimensional structure (a new protein) andmathematical filling into a relationship, resulting in the amplification of the paper’s distortions that create a new modality (dimension).

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Murayama's works are the irreversible tracks of the interaction between the support, which
is dynamically created on the basis of autopoiesis, and the perceptual and physical actionsof drawing on it**. They are log records that have undergone several stages of metamorphosis, a process of constant differentiation between the various intermediate realms. Thisexhibition marks a momentous turn in Murayama's quest, which underwent a new development after a quiet eruption in the age of pandemics.

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---*Functional receptors for the human coronaviruses SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2.
**The cellular automaton drawings developed on grains of old wood constitute a new development for theartist, where the support is treated as a record log (a word which curiously also refers to the cut trunk of atree) formed by nature.

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Yukiko Shikata [http://yukikoshikata.com]
Curator / Critic. Born in Kyoto. Director, Open Water Committee. Visiting Professor of Tama Art University /Tokyo Zokei University. Lecturer of Musashino Art University / IAMAS (Institute of Advanced Media Arts andSciences).

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--Takuro Someya Contemporary Art [Tokyo, https://tsca.jp]
BT [Bijutsutecho, https://bijutsutecho.com/magazine/review/23511]
Translated by Naoki Matsuyama