Hiroyuki Doi at Ricco/Maresca Gallery

Review of Hiroyuki Doi at Ricco/Maresca Gallery as published in Artillery magazine.


The term “Outsider” whatever it might have once meant is, at this point, nothing more than a marketing angle for galleries to sell art made by artists who exist outside of the normal social and power structures of the art-world – meaning, mostly, that they don’t have MFAs. Granted, some historical examples of artists from this category (Darger, Wolfi, et al) are real marginal characters – lunatics, cranks, and social isolates (not to mention the occassional pedophile) – but being an artist is marginal to begin with. Not just that, there are at least a few “insider” characters that might be described variously as lunatics, cranks, social isolates or even pedophiles.

Hiroyuki Doi would have to be a prime example of how this category has become irrelevant and therefore misleading. Doi is an untrained artist who started making work late in life (in his 30s.) Now, he’s sixty-four and, having been in a show at The Folk Art Museum and made appearances at The Outsider Art Fair, makes some of his living selling art. I suppose that, given his biography, what makes him an “Outsider” is the fact that he made work for a long time, solely for its own sake, for his own personal satisfaction. Of course, that’s not the definition of an “Outsider,” that’s the definition of an artist.

His work itself, for what it’s worth, bears none of the hall-marks of mawkishness that we might associate with that category either. Each piece is made from ink on paper, and composed of innumerable tiny circles, varying slightly in size though all about ¼” or smaller, organized in a loose Mandala-like symmetry. The term “obsessive-compulsive” might almost apply except that their repetitiveness belies an astonishing intricacy. They have the look of of light-filled effervescent sea foam or airy nebulae – ephemeral but also concrete. Not unlike a Jackson Pollack painting Doi’s Alkaseltzer constellations allude, tantalizingly, to any number of natural phenomenon without literally representing any of them.

Each circle seems to form a spontaneous grouping with the circles around it and therefore to form aggregate structures at varying scales. In part, this happens because his precise touch allows him to activate negative space inside of each circle. This sense of order – a consciousness of every part (at any scale that we choose to examine the work) – also effectively communicates the idea that these circles are meant to be seen as metaphors for the individual. We’re all unique and special, they seem to suggest, but only as part of a larger whole. In the U.S., the notion of the totally atomic, self-reliant, transcendently special “individual” underlies many of our guiding myths (cowboys, celebrity, laissez faire economics) – even as the modern world has completely eroded any actual autonomy. Our core beliefs, as a nation, are, on some level, misguided and deluded – not just wrong but absolutely contrary to reality. Doi’s work (abstract though it may be) suggests a useful antithesis.