Susumu Kamijo, “The Champion”, 2017, pastel pencil and oil pastel on paper, 27 x 22 inches
January 12-February 11, 2018
At first glance, Susumu Kamijo’s portrait-format work on paper “The Champion” presents itself abstractly in vernacular hues. A light pink circular mass thickly scrawled in vertical marks eclipses an orange ellipse colored-in concentrically. These two round shapes float in the top third of the blank paper above a thick red horizontal axis that divides the yellow foreground and white background in a fifty-fifty split.
Dangling below the pink mass are several dense geometric black shapes, including a large truncated triangle, that give way into areas of tessellating black and blue stippled dashes. Each of these forms are enclosed separately in magenta outlines, tying the units together and connecting the image. A sinuous and stuffed-looking physique begins to emerge from the territory of this field of detail with neighboring pastry bag-like extremities protruding from the bottom, each pinched at the end and tipped with blue.
Now, peeking out from the light pink bulk, are two empty blue eyes framed by long cropped dark-orange bangs and a black snout articulated with slender magenta contour lines. The slightly cocked head gazes at- tentively, as surprised as we are to find it there. A poodle is in recline- back legs gathered behind the body while the splayed front paws elegantly extend and bend at the cuffs in a mannered repose. The orange sun is setting at the end of a victorious day and Kamijo’s vigorously marked surface coupled with the flattened pictorial space gives “The Champion” an ecstatic visual charge, embodying the potential energy of this coiffed alert dog.
In 1976, Alaskan dog musher John Suter discovered almost accidentally that poodles love to run in the snow. Seeking to challenge the widely held presumption that poodles were a dainty breed of dog, Suter began spending thousands of dollars of his own money training poodles to compete in dogsled races. “No one ever did poodles before,” Suter, 66, said in a 2016 interview. “I thought maybe we could get some- thing going.” Experts often pointed out that Alaskan Huskies had been bred specifically to pull sleds be- ginning in the late 1800’s, putting Suter’s poodles at a 150-year disadvantage. Despite skepticism from the public and dogsled professionals alike, not to mention that his dogs were allegedly mistaken for sheep on occasion by Alaskan locals, the poodles performed alarmingly well. It wasn’t until 1991 that a stipulation was introduced in dogsled rules that “only dogs suitable for arctic travel” could compete, incidentally bar- ring poodles. Poodle lovers point to intimidation and bias as the reasoning for this limitation. In addition to being widely regarded for their elegance and intelligence, poodles are also formidable competitors in the most extreme conditions, highlighted by their successful foray into the 1000+ mile competition of pace, endurance, and resilience.
“The Champion” is one of several recent poodle paintings by Susumu Kamijo. Punctuated by punchy, interchanging and modular color, the body of work is expansive and engages difference and deferral, irre- ducibility and play, in the Derridian sense, without an apparent or necessary end. The self-referential signs of the act of painting itself, the marks and moves in excess of the semiotics of representation are fore- fronted by Kamijo’s use of pastel pencil and oil pastel. Pasty and brut in their application, these materials leave maximum indexical evidence of their use, literally leaving tiny chunks in their tracks as a result of the immediacy of drawing as applied pressure and movement.
The tradition of artists depicting their pets, very often portrayed with more personality and figurative idiosyncrasy than humans, cannot be overlooked when considering Kamijo’s poodles. Joan Brown, David Hockney, and Pierre Bonnard for example, evidence admiration for their companions in their distinctive representations. Yet where Hockney’s and Bonnard’s dogs play, sniff, sleep- in short, behave like animals- Brown’s and Kamijo’s dogs are aware of being portrayed, looking out at the viewer as subjects not objects, participants complicit in the process. “The Champion”, with its hollow gaze and tranquil poise, is a full blast subject that manages to simultaneously jump out and recede in both abstraction and figuration and people fucking love their dogs.