Tetsutaro Kamatani: “Beyond the Surface” An Exhibition Celebrating the Publication of His Monograph

LAG is pleased to present Tetsutaro Kamatani: Beyond the Surface, a solo exhibition on view from September 19 to October 10, 2026, marking the publication of the artist’s new monograph. Centered on a body of paintings created in recent years, alongside works that explore new mediums, the exhibition offers a broad view of Kamatani’s current artistic practice. The publication of his monograph marks an important milestone and provides a timely opportunity to encounter the current state of the distinctive pictorial language he has developed and explored over many years.

Working with a range of self-developed paints and solvents, Kamatani has cultivated a distinctive mode of expression informed by a refined sensibility that also resonates with traditions of Japanese craftsmanship. Flowers, birds, human figures, skulls, ornamental forms, and other diverse motifs fill the pictorial field, pr oliferating and overlapping in multiple layers to create a resplendent world of vivid color and rich texture. These sumptuous, highly decorative surfaces exert a powerful visual pull, drawing the viewer’s gaze ever deeper into the painting. Through this almost excessive proliferation of imagery, Kamatani’s work may prompt us to reconsider the very nature of beauty.

In recent years, Kamatani has begun working directly on wood as a support, allowing his works to engage more explicitly with the surrounding space and even with the passage of time. In the works presented in this exhibition, the vivid colors of paint, the transparency of resin, the metallic sheen of pigments, and the organic texture of wood exist in both harmony and tension. While offering an intense visual pleasure, their very excess paradoxically evokes notions of emptiness and void—the presence of what is not there. In Kamatani’s work, the pleasure of looking and the limits of seeing seem to emerge simultaneously. His paintings offer an inexhaustible field of discovery, reflecting, perhaps, even the fundamental ways in which we perceive and make sense of the world.