On Kawara

Kariya, 1933 – Nova York, 2014

Living in the United States, where he started producing work in tune with the conceptual art debate in the 60s, On Kawara focuses on a self-referential and experiential understanding of language and time. One of his best-known series is Today, begun in 1966. The series consists of paintings that do nothing but state the day, month and year of their making. Instead of channeling energy into composition, color and theme, the series obeys a few set rules: the date is always centralized and painted in white, in the same font, on a matte canvas.

Unlike other North-American conceptual artists, Kawara used painting as his main medium. In this series, for example, painting is the instrument he uses to keep time and state his own existence in the world, converted here into a simple time marker.

On display at Frestas, One Million Years is a reflection on time. Begun in the 1960s and still open to new experiences, even after Kawara’s death in 2014, the work consists of two books: the first, Past, is a record dedicated to “all those who lived and died”, and contains a list of all years from 998,031 BC to 1969; the second volume, Future, lists all years from 1993 to 1,001,992, and is dedicated to “the last one”. The instruction is for the books to be read in English by a man and a woman, who should utter past and future dates alternately. With this work, Kawara shows how random the chronological organization of life can be, as well as the absurdity of grappling with swathes of time as long as a million years.

[L.B.]