Through the Motions¹: Laying Brick with Maria Taniguchi

For a decade and a half now, Maria Taniguchi, whose practice includes sculpture, installation, video, and printmaking, has obsessively and methodically, produced a singular type of painting. Of varying sizes and proportions, these dark brooding monochromes, most often larger-than-life in scale, consist of tessellations of hundreds or thousands of identical rectangular units, each measuring two by six centimeters, arranged in neat lines. The units in each row are offset from those in the row above or below by half the width of the rectangle, resulting in the familiar staggered brick pattern known as a running or stretcher bond. This referent gives them the moniker Taniguchi and others have come to use to describe them: brick paintings.

Despite their precise, minimal appearance, these canvases are unnervingly uncertain. They are neither strictly abstraction nor representation; they both are and are not an image of a brick wall. Taniguchi further emphasizes this ambiguity by simply leaning many of the larger canvases in the series up against the gallery wall, so that they inhabit space as both painting and sculpture, image and object. The taller ones feel totemic, looming over the viewer like monoliths or stele. The broader ones, like the monumental sixteen-foot wide canvas in this show, resemble walls not just representationally but also phenomenologically. Their opaque impenetrable expanses evoke actual barriers; they impose, resist, enclose, contain, obstruct. 

Taniguchi begins these canvases by applying a flat even base coat, usually a dark grey, though she has been experimenting with color, introducing subtle undertones of deep purple in some recent examples. This ground is carefully overlaid with her signature brick pattern drawn in graphite. Working with the canvas on the floor, Taniguchi then meticulously and painstakingly fills in each brick-like unit individually with a thin wash of black acrylic paint. She works methodically and sequentially, in a manner analogous to how a bricklayer might build a wall. She works in sections, until she is interrupted or distracted, or either she or the paint she has mixed for the day is exhausted. Despite the rigor of her process, she is not precise when she prepares her paint, forsaking measurements and formulas for instinct and muscle memory. Any leftover paint is simply reused during the next work session, with water added to dried pigment to make it usable again. As a result, though the pattern remains uniform within one and across all the canvases, the painted surface rarely is, with the saturation of pigment and the tone it produces varying subtly with each unit. In some places, when a particularly dilute preparation was used the pigment pools in the center of the brick resulting in a darker denser core encircled by an only just perceptible halo. At other times, when the wash was thicker to begin with, a gentle almost invisible gradient extends across the brick, tracking the strokes of the brush. Changing atmospheric conditions in her home studio further impact the way the paint dries, with the heat and humidity of tropical Manila imprinting itself on these canvases. 

Upon close and sustained looking the paintings appear to vibrate, to hum. While the delicate graphite pattern is reflective, the painted units within it absorb light. The lines project while the bricks withdraw, resulting in a visual tension, an almost ontological oscillation between drawing and painting, graphite and paint, line and surface, structure and substance. However, Taniguchi’s primary interests are not formal or retinal. These paintings are not simply another clever attempt at approaching the zero degree of painting that the Suprematists first sought out. Simple but sophisticated, the brick paintings shrewdly synthesize the formal gestures of Frank Stella’s and Ad Reinhardt’s iconic black monochromes with the conceptual and performative works of On Kawara and Tehching Hsieh, which embed repetition back into the realm of everyday life, using it as a tool through which to interrogate and reflect on existence, presence, time, and labor. 

In Taniguchi’s paintings, repetition, as a methodology, is not intended to produce identity but reveal difference, registering the inconsistency, unpredictability, and contingency of the artist’s hand and body and the context in which she works. Her daily practice of painting, is also, like that of Kawara’s and Hsieh’s practices, ritualistic and meditative, even therapeutic in our times of information and sensory overload. She has described it as a means to regulate, to quiet and focus an otherwise easily distracted mind.² Akin to breathing, repetition presents a path towards mindfulness, towards presence, towards embodiment, allowing one to paradoxically both inhabit and transcend the body at work. Sitting or lying on top of the canvas as she works, Taniguchi is literally and metaphorically subsumed by and into each painting and the rarefied geometries we encounter in the gallery are imbued with the physical act of their creation. Unsurprisingly then, through the years, Taniguchi has frequently returned to bodily metaphors to explain what she does: the brick pattern as skin, as nervous system.³

The brick pattern, which can extend endlessly, is neither representational nor compositional. It is, instead, a standardized matrix through which each painting can register the process and conditions of its manufacture, can record the history of its making. It functions as a syntax or protocol that translates the inchoate and contingent noise of this lived experience, the raw data of painting, into information, into code, into signal. These paintings are ultimately about time and labor, not as abstract autonomous concepts but as embodied phenomena, interrelated and mediated through the energy, effort, and exertion of a body at work. The brick pattern is a mode of working or, more precisely, a work ethic. It allows us to understand painting as praxis.

Taniguchi’s titles are as austere as her canvases. The brick paintings are, for the most part, untitled and unnumbered. This exhibition, “Figure Study,” simply repeats a title she has used before, first for an installation in 2012-13 that was anchored by a looping just under forty-minute long black-and-white video of two men digging up earth in a dense forest.⁴ A deadpan durational document of labor, this key work makes explicit the importance of these concepts in Taniguchi’s painting practice, and hints at its social, cultural, and political subtexts. A significant percentage of the Philippines’s annual gross domestic product consists of the remittances of Overseas Filipino Workers (OFW). Many of these migrant workers engage in types of labor—manual (such as the workers in the video), domestic, and care work—that are repetitive, and seemingly interminable. Such physical and reproductive labor builds, sustains, and maintains worlds and lives, is both structural and integral and, more recently, essential, but ultimately remains invisible. Taniguchi’s brick paintings render such labor, and its temporal logic, visible and palpable. Embodied in and through her body, they materialize in paint on canvas. Each painting marks the passage of time and holds the memory of its manufacture. It is itself a body, a vessel that receives and collects the facts of its creation. Each is, in that sense, both a history painting or, as the exhibition’s title astutely suggests, a “figure study” of a body at work.  

– Murtaza Vali

¹This seemingly banal phrase, that Taniguchi used to describe her painting process in a 2017 interview, wonderfully conveys both the sense that her “brick paintings” are a type of “action painting,” their surfaces recording the countless embodied actions that lead to their creation, and that this process is simply an everyday ritual or habit, almost unconscious, guided by muscle memory. Maria Taniguchi in Christina Chua, ”On the Walls: An Interview with Maria Taniguchi,” The Artling, January 16, 2017, https://theartling.com/en/artzine/on-the-walls-interview-maria-taniguchi/. 

²Maria Taniguchi in Marlyne Sahakian, “Where I Work: Maria Taniguchi,” ArtAsiaPacific, June 25, 2013, https://artasiapacific.com/ideas/where-i-work-maria-taniguchi.

³Taniguchi describes the brick pattern as “skin” in Chua, op. cit., and as “nervous system” in Diana d’Arenberg, “Maria Taniguchi,” Ocula, November 22, 2016, https://ocula.com/magazine/conversations/maria-taniguchi/.

⁴For discussions of this important installation see Chantal Wong, “It’s difficult to talk about Maria’s work,” LEAP: The International Art Magazine of Contemporary China 35, October 29, 2015, http://www.leapleapleap.com/2015/10/it-is-difficult-to-talk-about-marias-work/, and Susan Gibb, “Maria Taniguchi, “Big Data and Raw Materials,” Maria Taniguchi (Tokyo: Taka Ishii Gallery, 2017), n.p. 

Maria Taniguchi (b. Dumaguete City, Philippines, in 1981; lives and works Manila, Philippines) works across a diverse range of media including painting, video, sculpture, pottery, printmaking, drawing, and writing. Her practice focuses on concepts of composing, constructing, and framing whilst referring to the craftsmanship and history of the Philippines. Taniguchi won the Hugo Boss Asia Art Award in 2015. She has recently been featured at institutions such as Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2022); Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei (2021); the 12th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju (2018); 21st Biennale of Sydney, Sydney (2018). Her work is held in numerous public and private collections globally, including the Tate Modern, London; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; Singapore Art Museum, Singapore; and QAGOMA, Brisbane; and KADIST, San Francisco and Paris; among others. 

Murtaza Vali is a critic, curator, and art historian based in Brooklyn and Sharjah. A recipient of a 2011 Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for Short-Form Writing, he publishes regularly in art periodicals and exhibition catalogues for non-profit institutions and commercial galleries around the world, including essays in recent monographs on Fahd Burki (Jameel Arts Centre/Mousse Publishing, 2023) and Seher Shah (Rizzoli, 2023). Vali is Adjunct Curator at the Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai, where he curated the widely acclaimed inaugural group exhibition Crude (2018), which explored the relationship between oil and modernity across South West Asia, and is currently working towards a follow up examining hotels and the hospitality industry across the Global South. Other recent curatorial projects include: Proposals for a Memorial to Partition, Jameel Arts Centre (2022-23); Curator-at-large of Oh, Gods of Dust and Rainbows, FRONT International 2022: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art (2022); and (with Uzma Rizvi) Accommodations, the National Pavilion of Saudi Arabia at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale (2021).