Tenki & Jerry
Tenki Hiramatsu & Jerry the Marble Faun
In the previous century film theorists often wrote that we went to the movies to sit with other people, alone in the darkness, lost in our desire and searching for some imagined sense of home. The writer Guy Davenport described the imagination as a “drunk man who lost his watch, and must get drunk to find it again.” Perhaps Dorothy, in her quest out of Oz, should have followed Davenport’s advice. Maybe that’s not so different from what actually happens in the movie. As the Surrealist poet Paul Eluard wrote in the same year of The Wizard of Oz’s release, “There is another world, but it is in this one.”
In Tenki Hiramatsu’s paintings, the noirish outlines of sad and lonely men are obscured by their technicolor backdrops. They maintain the blank mysteriousness that’s the purview of the outsider, allowing Hiramatsu to move freely between dissimilar genres and styles. Adrift in abstract landscapes, Hiramatsu’s shadowy figures start to look hazy and parallax, like the sound of tape warping. They leave the impression of objects seen from the window of a fast-moving train: always receding, haunting in their elusiveness.
If Hiramatsu’s protagonists look like they are under the constant threat of erasure, Jerry the Marble Faun has erased his completely. His sculptures compose a kind of hero’s journey in which the hero’s been cut out and all that remains are the props. Occupying the same sublimely synthetic American landscape as Sleeping Beauty’s Castle, their resemblance to mythical creatures and garden ornaments alludes to Jerry’s past life as the Bouvier-Beales’s hunky handyman, as memorialized in Grey Gardens.
Seen together at CASTLE, the works by both artists form a memorable double feature, “Tenki & Jerry,” that achieves its power by occupying the kind of liminal space shared by movies and dreams. Perfect, then, to experience them in an apartment building designed to look like a castle, in a gallery that’s also a home.
Sam Freilich
Tenki Hiramatsu (b. 1986 in Wakayama Japan) lives and works in Karlsruhe, Germany. He graduated from The Academy of Fine Arts, Karlsruhe, DE in 2019. He has had solo exhibitions at Barbara Seiler Galerie, Zurich (2022); Sukima Gallery, Japan (2022); Claas Reiss, London (2021). Hiramatsu’s work is included in the collections of Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Credit Suisse, and Zurich Insurance. Awards include the Stober-Kunstpreis (2022).
Jerry the Marble Faun (b. 1955 in Brooklyn, New York) lives and works in Queens, New York. He has exhibited at Shandaken Project, New York (2022); SITUATIONS (2021); Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York (2021). Jerry’s work is included in the public collection of the American Folk Art Museum (New York). He has held residencies at Shandaken Project at the Storm King Art Center (New York) and The Elaine De Kooning House (New York). He was awarded the Visual Aids Artist Material Grant.
