Painting is a window that connects everyday life with "somewhere else."

Since Brunelleschi geometrically demonstrated perspective in the early 1400s, many painters have used flat surfaces to depict virtual spaces and stages. In a sense, these can be seen as optical illusions that connect the fictional world with the real world. Renaissance and Baroque church frescoes, for example, depict the moment of Christ's birth as if it were actually happening in that space. Of course, the situation changed in modern times when a genre of painting independent of space, based on the premise of a flat surface, was established. Nevertheless, even today, in many figurative paintings that use perspective, the painting as a window is still alive and well.

Harada creates a fictional world within his computer, complete with houses and parks, and continues to paint the landscapes as if he were standing there. Trees grow in this world, and there are even galleries where paintings are displayed. The landscapes created on the computer screen are not "realistic"; they lack the thickness of atmosphere, and therefore the colors do not have the ambiguous gradations that arise from the way light hits them, as is the case in the real world. It is a fictional world depicted in a painting of a computer world from a bygone era. Yet, the sun rises there, and shadows move with the passage of time. In this way, Harada replaces the world he has created in his own space through simulation with a landscape painting on a real canvas, and paints in the real world.

This doesn't mean Harada has no interest in the real world. Harada's technique became extremely complex when he began to take paintings created in the real world, bring them back into a virtual space, and then paint the exhibition scene—with the paintings hanging on the walls of a gallery he built there—as an actual painting. When this exhibition scene is returned to our real world and hung on a real wall, the space depicted in Harada's painting suddenly appears as a window cut into the wall. The painted floor and walls begin to correspond with the real walls and floors. The visual effect becomes even more complex when the original painting of the painting hanging in the fictional exhibition gallery is displayed next to it. There is a sense of spatial "distortion" that is like an advanced form of optical illusion. Or, some of Harada's paintings depict people looking up at the windows of a building. We view the windows, which are depicted tilted from the beginning as if we were looking up at them, from the front. Because the vanishing point of perspective is clearly different from that of the real world, a kind of insurmountable "twist" occurs between the world of the painting and the real world.

In modern times, canvases and panels became commonplace, making it possible to hang painted landscapes anywhere. As a result, painting lost its roots in a specific place in the strict sense. The appeal of Harada's work, which moves between reality and fictional spaces, lies in its lighthearted deconstruction of the system of figurative painting as a window depicting "somewhere other than here," which has historically supported painting. When Harada's works are presented with the premise of being displayed in an actual space, and when he intentionally introduces distortions and twists into them, and begins to depict fictional windows as if they were fictional windows, perhaps painting can exert its power as art that is more rooted in place.

Toshiro Kondo

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