Motohiro Takeda’s artworks create an ambient milieu of quiet dominance and gentle radiance, graced by delicate remnants of botanical matter and nostalgic objects. This “garden of time,” as the artist calls it, acquires its form through found wood, stones, and flowers in nature, which are given new lives through shou sugi ban, or yakisugi, a traditional Japanese wood-burning technique. His latest solo presentation at Alison Bradley Projects provides a comprehensive survey of his recent trajectory.
Through poetically composed topographies, Takeda creates meditative landscapes of control and chaos that gesture at a proto-resolution towards infinity, permeated by a vital force reified in a radically tangible material rhapsody. This force is the non-material medium of the space he choreographs, an energy that arises from the resonance between the artist and nature in all its vast meanings.
Always hinting at an intrinsic mortality, the works he creates evoke a rebirth of nature and time. In his “Hanaikada (Flower Boat)” series, Takeda cast freshly-picked sakura, daisies, and hydrangeas into concrete, allowing their vibrant colors to slowly fade over time, transforming them into timepieces that record the process of decay. The centerpiece, Untitled (Spear) (2024), features a cast-mold concrete tree trunk protruding out of a moss-covered stone. The calligraphic form stands as the afterlife of the original tree—a doppelgänger that conjures an imaginary of permanence.
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