The short review of this book would say that it does what it says on the cover, which is emblazoned with the words ‘Teppei Takeda Flowers’: it presents 34 paintings of flowers by Japanese artist Teppei Takeda. It’s a beautiful book (designed by Naoto Fukasawa), a little under .4-size. Each painting is full-page and features a single flower made up of a minimal series of brushstrokes that swirl partially mixed swathes of paint into a cluster of petals, the whole attached to a green stalk that looks like a supportive calligraphic gesture (if the paintings were sentences and the brushstrokes words, the stalks would be punctuation marks). The paint gives off the vibe of cake icing, causing a reaction not unlike the drooling triggered by one of American painter Wayne Thiebaud’s celebrated renderings of baked goods. Looking at the paintings, you can read the strokes and see the paint mixing, along with all other traces of their manufacture. Perhaps that’s why each work is titled Painting of Painting. But, of course, they look like particular flowers too. In a short text, Takeda states that the works are answers to the question of why he paints, which, in its circularity, appears to say something while actually saying nothing. For Takenori Miyamoto (all texts here are printed in English and Japanese), the paintings are a reflection of the artist’s personal life: being the primary carer for a young daughter. For Brian Dillon, they are a reminder of a Balzac short story and the disjuncture between abstraction and figuration (with segues to the work of Roy Lichtenstein and Jackson Pollock). But perhaps what this book really demonstrates is how much can be loaded into a single stroke of a brush. And in that sense it’s a reminder of why people fall in love with art.
Flowers by Brian Dillon, Takenori Miyamoto and Teppei Takeda. United Vagabonds, ¥5,000 (hardcover)
From the April 2025 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
