For the inauguration, the artist wanted to create a calligraphic performance which – I remember well – scandalized some young Milanese art critics who, amazed, exclaimed: «But this is action painting!», almost as if to reproach Imaï for decades of delay in the American experience of the 1950s. He, who had heard them, stopped his action for only a few moments, just long enough to reply: «Yes, but we’ve been doing it for five thousand years!»».
These lines are part of the presentation text that Gino Di Maggio dedicates to Toshimitsu Imaï (1928 – 2002), on the occasion of the exhibition that Fondazione Mudima is dedicating in recent days to the great Japanese painter and which takes up two other exhibitions that were held by the foundation in 1993 (after participation in the Venice Biennale) and in 2001.
An important text not only because it clarifies how Imaï, long an international exponent of the informal, was capable of uniting the profound Japanese tradition with modern international currents, but also for the enlightening and enlightened words of Gino Di Maggio, promoter and organizer of exhibitions and cultural events, collector, essayist, publisher of art periodicals since the Seventies and founder, in 1989, of the Mudima Foundation in Milan, the first for contemporary art in Italy.
Di Maggio was born in 1940 in Novara Sicilia, in the province of Messina (interesting to note that the other curator, Nino Sottile Zumbo, is also from Messina, from Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto, while the third, the art historian Dominique Stella, had already curated the 2001 exhibition) and was fundamental for Milan’s cultural path in the figurative arts; he has now settled in Oliveri, also in the province of Messina, where he founded an association that helps young Sicilian artists. He recalls how Imaï, in the second Milanese exhibition in 2001, was the first important Japanese artist to create works on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and also on the Nanjing massacre, committed by the Japanese against the Chinese, towards which the artist «assumed a moral responsibility». In fact «Massacre de Nankin 1937» and «Nankin» are the vital center (I use this adjective precisely in contrast to the word massacre) of the exhibition which also presents four works dedicated to the launching of the atomic bombs which, among other things, were the cause of the health problems that Imaï suffered throughout his life.
Large material paintings, with dark and intense colours, with insertions of various materials, from a conceptual point of view similar to Picasso’s «Guernica», are a manifesto of informal Japanese art (and dripping). «It gives us – says Sottile Zumbo – a punch in the stomach, but it awakens our sleeping consciences. The paintings are poems for universal peace.” And they are also a sort of moral and artistic testament, because Imaï, already ill, died the following year. Also on display are the calligraphies created by Imaï in 2001, “told” also by the splendid photographs of Fabrizio Garghetti, which testify to a gesture that has its roots in the Zen tradition and in the teachings of the Tao, long before action painting until introducing with the Rinpa school, as Sottile Zumbo still recalls, the “tarashikomi” technique, which means dripping, a precursor of American dripping.