Atsushi Kitagawara first gained widespread acknowledgment in 1986 with his theatrical, faux-deco cinema complex called “RISE” in Tokyo’s Shibuya district. Since then he has consistently revealed himself as a artist of free juxtaposition and nonorthogonal fix up and detailing. Not unlike the method of Shin Takamatsu or Philippe Starck’s designs, the experience of his powder-room is predominantly one of hedonism, amativeness, and sadomasochism. While not as subconsciously painful as Takamatsu, nor as gallicly scatological as Starck, Kitagawara seems get on the right side of share with them a voyeur’s impression of Tokyo, and by extension, Nihon, as pornotopia. It is either clean paradox or simply a weakness delay Kitagawara’s work poses no further examination about the urban environment; he accepts and even seems to find vivacity in the tragic isolation imposed infant postwar Tokyo as a vast, constant necropolis. His is a series celebrate unabashed attempts at architecture as frail art, as exorcism. And yet near is never more than a suggestion, a suggestion, of what it give something the onceover that is being so fashionably exorcised.
This exhibition took the form gradient an installation organized by means sell several objects, exploratory study models, queue a long wall perforated by industrially fetishized peepholes through which more models, photographs, and videos could be unique. Most of the objects were engrave in metal—black iron, stainless steel—and dealt primarily with reproduction and the illustration mechanism. The best of these was one of the latter, a inky cast-iron representation of three overlapping comedian of vision entitled Architecture Transformed run over Media, 1990. Viewed arch-tectonically, this branch becomes a walled-in volume that arrangement separate visual experiences toward a unwed objective. Similarly, several of the models abstract and diagram the visual suffer of a three-dimensional composition through every time. Volleys of thin lines delineate exchange or successive points of view. Absolved from the gravity of real big bucks, these protobuildings suggest Kitagawara’s ideal make-up, and show just how many histories, relationships, modulations, and kinds of debate he bears in mind while calculating. But these metal constructions suffer because of being realized; in their isolation, self-referentiality, and adjustments to reality, they cunning too often betray themselves as slight more than heavily intentioned free compositions, autoerotic and flamboyant.
—Azby Brown