NAOFUMI MARUYAMA – PUDDLE
2025-12-22The exhibition features fifteen new paintings and an equal number of works on paper, in which Maruyama deepens his poetic exploration of fluidity and perception. His paintings are created on damp cotton canvases, allowing pigment to flow freely. The paint seeps into the fabric, evaporates, leaves traces, blurs again. The image emerges not through delineation but through dispersion — a process that recalls the ‘Morotai’ style (misty or vague), where gradations of color replaced the line drawings characteristic of traditional Japanese painting, but also the stain paintings of Morris Louis or Helen Frankenthaler from the postwar American Color Field movement.
In Maruyama’s work, there are no hard lines, no fixed contours. Everything breathes and blends. Mountains dissolve into rivers, rivers into air, air into memory. His paintings seem to hover between appearing and disappearing, like reflections on a water surface that ripple and fade at the slightest touch.
Opposite – Kicking Water (therefore), 2025
Exhibition runs through to December 10th, 2025
Keteleer Gallery
Pourbusstraat 3 – 5
2000 Antwerp
Belgium
