832 1983

Funasaka Yoshisuke made this, what looks like, a print, of a grid, that's not quite straight, on a grey ground, with these little, wormy, coloured shapes hanging out in one row. I wonder if Yoshisuke was thinking about musical notation when they made this, or maybe just the colours of candy. I imagine them carefully carving the matrix for printing, and deciding how to arrange those stripes – each colour singing its little song. And that slightly off-kilter grid, that saves it from being too uptight, too formal. It makes me wonder if maybe Yoshisuke had a different kind of grid in mind, like the way Agnes Martin worked. It’s as if the history of geometric abstraction is hanging out here, just being itself, not caring too much about what we think. That’s what paintings do; they just keep the conversation going, back and forth, influencing and being influenced.