Aerosolic Forms: Enrico Isamu Oyama Solo Exhibiition

Born in Tokyo and working between New York and Tokyo, Oyama’s practice encompasses painting, sculptural installation, and site responsive works, and is rooted in a sustained investigation into the relationships between writing, line, and bodily action. Within this framework, aerosol paint has emerged as one of his primary media, not merely as a tool, but as a condition that fundamentally reconfigures how painting operates. Released through atomization, pigment no longer reaches the surface through liquid contact. Instead, it disperses into minute particles suspended in the air, gradually settling in response to airflow, distance, and environmental forces. Prior to deposition, pigment remains in continual flux, rendering time, atmosphere, and spatial conditions integral to the formation of the work. Painting thus shifts away from the primacy of manual control, unfolding through the modulation of multiple interdependent variables, while retaining an irreducible element of unpredictability shaped through ongoing negotiation between surface, medium, and environment.

This approach extends Oyama’s long-standing engagement with aerosol writing, furthering his inquiry into how writing, once disentangled from semantic meaning and legibility, may persist as visual action. Aerosolic Forms does not prescribe a trajectory to be followed, but gestures toward indications that gradually come into visibility through process. The exhibition thereby advances a fundamental inquiry into the formation of painting itself. When line no longer arises from direct contact between brush and canvas, how can painting be constituted through the interplay of material, distance, and time?

Within this trajectory of practice, Oyama has developed his core visual motif, Quick Turn Structure, as a response to the inherent indeterminacy of aerosol as a medium. Rather than originating from premeditated form or fixed technique, this structure draws from the arcs, velocities, and abrupt directional shifts generated by bodily movement through space. As movement, distance, and material conditions shift, line unfolds accordingly, producing variations in direction, density, and rhythm. Through successive layers of spraying, accumulation, and reduction, these lines gradually build into thickened structures that articulate relationships between positive and negative space. Vision is correspondingly reoriented, moving between interior and exterior as it navigates overlaps, turns, and layered depth. Here, the canvas becomes a site for examining how painting itself takes shape.

In Aerosolic Forms, Oyama juxtaposes aerosol, ink, laser inscription, and installation, allowing his methodology to articulate across differing material configurations. In FFIGURATI #655, a polished surface combined with aluminum paneling provides relatively stable conditions for aerosolized pigment to accumulate into clearly legible layers. By contrast, FFIGURATI #890 employ untreated canvas, where pigment oscillates between absorption, diffusion, and deposition, with density and texture emerging through the material’s responsiveness. FFIGURATI #777 further extends the logic of non contact, as laser inscription allows form to emerge through energy modulation and the passage of time rather than physical imposition. Across these practices, particulate matter lingers in mist before settling, producing directional suggestions that remain provisional and unresolved.

In this exhibition, painting no longer presents itself as a completed form, but as a condition continually in the making. Line gathers and disperses within the gaps between distance and time, guiding perception through shifts in density, rhythm, and direction without promising arrival. Released from the confines of the planar surface, painting unfolds alongside space, time, and the body, becoming a way of seeing suspended within mist.