Lypophrenia

Born in 1946 in Nagoya, Japan, Hiroyuki Doi has been working as an artist in Japan for the past thirty years. Since the death of his younger brother 20 years ago he has been working on pieces that express the transmigration of the soul, cosmos, and human cells using pen and ink on the Japanese papers called washi. “Now that we are living in the age of computerized society, I believe human work using human hands has to be emphasized more. That’s one of my reasons, why I keep on working on my new works. By drawing, I started to feel relief, at some point I started to feel that something other than my self allowed me to draw these works. Suppose every creature is a circle, which exists in this world, how many of them can I draw? That is my life work and my challenge. I have to keep on working, otherwise nothing will be brought in to existence. By drawing circles I feel I am alive and existing in the cosmos.” – Hiroyuki Doi

Ricco/Maresca is presenting the Japanese artist Hiroyuki Doi work from January 6th – February 19th 2011. The self-taught artist is known for his mysterious and emotive abstractions whose compositions are made up of billowing, cloud-like forms. In his drawings on Japanese papers made with mulberry and other kinds of bark, Doi, who is based in Tokyo and began making art after many years as a chef in Japan, builds up his dramatic images using little more than random clusters of tiny circles.