Although we look at quite a lot of art, we cannot think of another artist whose work is called to mind when we view that of Hiroyuki Hamada. His work seems to us more akin to that of a people than it is to that of some other individual artist, an anonymous, maybe an extinct people, whose signature survives only in the strange and compelling idiosyncrasy of the art it created, and which remains a spur in the imagination of the present only on account of that art, though nothing else of its spiritual life survives. Like the residual artifacts of Easter Island, Maltese or Cycladic statuary, or many of the ancient tribal arts of Africa, Hamada’s work gives the impression of deriving from an arcane and mysterious culture, and whose very purpose within that culture is obscure at best; the work of eons, of vast patience, of utter unconcern with or knowledge or expectation of any viewer but itself, of eternity. The works themselves are that lost culture from which they derive, their creator(s) fully sublimated within them.

From his early more figural and allegoric work through the work of recent months, Hamada’s art is the field of a tension between tranquility and a pullulating and furious passion, a dynamic expressed in any number of ways, sometimes transpiring, like a geo-thermal relationship between surface and depth, sometimes in the way of a delicate cultural artifact scarred in the course of war or wear or decline or neglect, sometimes suggesting the passivity of the contemplative east exposed to a barbarian west, sometimes the simplicity of a naïve west in the face of the passionless violence of the east. And east and west are essential in Hamada’s work. He came to America an anomic youth out of a Ryu Murakami novel, discovered the stability of his ancestral culture amid the confusion of our own and looked back in the face of the rebellion he’d brought with him from the perspective of the art or method of meditation he developed here. Hamada’s art comes into being at a glacial pace, the work of months or even years of painstaking and minute attentions. No doubt the sense that these are organic, utterly self-contained, objects derives from this lengthy process of maturation—and what is most remarkable about them is that, for all their composure, they still vitally portray the tension, in detail and in concept, that is their soul.

It is astonishing that Hamada manages to produce such diversity from such a restricted palette of form and color. One is inclined to see a mode of speciation at work, for which constraint is an engine of invention. As Lydia Millet has observed, the works constitute a sort of family, perhaps in the way that, with all their extraordinary variety, coleoptera remain beetles. And it is in seeing them together that both their family resemblance and their individual uniqueness are most powerfully revealed. We are delighted that we can offer you that experience at Pierre Menard Gallery

A fully illustrated catalogue has been prepared to accompany the exhibition, which includes a foreword by Edward Albee, whose own collection contains several works by Hamada, and essays by Lydia Millet and the artist. Forty works will be on display during the show, including both a selection of early paintings and many examples of the truly extraordinary constructions on which Hamada has been working during the last decade. Following the Pierre Menard exhibition, Hamada's work will be the subject of a museum show entitled Surface Tension at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, SC, from May 18 to June 9, 2007 and a solo show at Randall Scott Gallery in Washington, DC, from June 16 to July 14, 2007.