RHYTHMS OF WHITE: BY RAKUKO NAITO

“I feel natural forms and textures have a reality that can not be completed by trying to paint or drawn by hand. I try to experiment and manipulate materials to create my own world.” -Rakuko Naito

The celebration of Rhythms of White, her solo exhibition at Tayloe Piggott Gallery, will not mark Rakuko Naito’s first visit to Wyoming. She and her husband, artist Tadaaki Kuwayama, were here in 1958, en route from Tokyo to New York, where they have lived and worked for over sixty years. A friend of Rakuko’s had a daughter living on a ranch in Wyoming, and recommended a visit. So, after setting foot for the first time in the United States in Los Angeles, she and Tadaaki boarded a Greyhound bus and traveled to Buffalo, Wyoming for a week on a cattle ranch.

Rakuko Naito: It was really quite a large ranch. Every morning we had breakfast with the cowboys. It was a really nice experience. I think we stayed about one week. Then we took another bus, and it was maybe three days before we arrived in New York. We really loved Wyoming. I thought, when will we ever have an occasion to visit here again? And now, years later, decades later, here we are!

Naito’s work, rhythmic folds of rice paper sculptures designed to hang on the wall, reside somewhere between our notion of “drawing” and “sculpture.” This exhibition presents a large selection of work from the artist’s oeuvre which has never been shown together. Each work investigates the properties of different kinds of Japanese rice paper, with different shapes and forms repeated in different sized squares. The effect, both in each singular work and the exhibition altogether, is mesmerizing. In one work, thousands of tiny folds create a circular “gig-zag” checkerboard pattern, in another, a sea of perfectly formed fans creates a veritable ocean of white. Overall, rhythms form in the folds and undulations of rice paper. Without making a sound, the monochromatic assemblages of white, cream, and taupe draw the viewer’s eye in and out in a harmonic, meditative symphony. 

Naito’s first solo exhibition was at the World House Gallery, New York, in 1965. Since then, she has exhibited all over the world, including many group exhibitions, such as the Mies-Van-der-Rohe Haus, “White Box,” Berlin, Germany, 2019; Monocromos: de Malevich al presente, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2004; the International Women Artists' Biennale, Incheon, Korea 2009; Optic Nerve: Perceptual Art of the 1960s, Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio 2007; Optical Edge, Pratt Manhattan Gallery, New York , 2007; A Moment Becomes Eternity, Bergen Museum, New Jersey,1993; Tokyo International Biennale (1974); Black & White, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut (1966); and Motion and Movement, Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, Ohio (1964).