Work 1957

This is ‘Work’ by Akira Kanayama, we don’t know when it was made, but it feels immediate, made in a moment. It's a mass of tangled threads, like a Jackson Pollock, but tighter, more controlled. Look at the way the black dominates, a dense cloud, but then you see the pops of red, blue, and yellow underneath. It’s as if Kanayama built up this chaotic network, allowing for small interruptions of color, like little rebellions. There’s a real push and pull between control and chance. You can almost feel the artist’s hand moving, but it’s obscured, indirect. It makes me think of Cy Twombly, someone else who embraces the scribble, not as a mistake, but as a form of thinking. I think art lives in the space between intention and accident, and this piece feels like a beautiful record of that tension.