Naoki Fuku is a Japanese artist who lives and works in Germany and Switzerland. From the beginning of his artistic career in London, he has distinguished himself by a highly personal style. Through paintings and installations he touches the deeper self of the public by fusing traditional brush-writing techniques with the immediacy of Western expressionism.

Naoki is a deserter from Japan, a fugitive from obedient calligraphy and from the imprisonment of individual freedom, who, however, has not been able to get rid of the asceticism of ink, or, above all, the absolute demand of his expressive office. But everything that he left in the far east returns through these canvases and papers like the waves of Akashi Bay: the dialectics of the full and empty, the complete and the lost. Among the works of this exhibition, first solo show for him in Spain, the great self-portraits of his series “Study of the Human Mind” stand out. They are an offer punched at night, silences of bamboo, the emotions and thoughts that almost break him, when he allows himself to go so much that at he could be any of us: woman, man, joyful, terrible, happy, devastated or overflowing.

ARASHIZUKA, the title of the exhibition, is an invented word that joins in progression two equally antithetical elements: arashi, 嵐, “storm”, composed of a mountain on the wind; and 静か, shizuka, “calm”, which represents the ancient ideograms of well, vegetation and a hand grabbing an arm: stagnant water. In these works by Naoki Fuku, it is the calm that follows the storm, and it is also the storm which, in suspense, contains the breath.

Alfredo Mateos Paramio
Curator