Reviews and reports on my drawings and exhibitions

1. The New York Times Art Review (September 2005)

   1.1 The New York Times Art Review (September 2005) 日本語

2. Fall Preview New York (September 2005)

3. The New York Times (December 2002)

   3.1 The New York Times (December 2002) 日本語

4. art on paper (April 2003)

Published in the New York Times 'Art Review' by HOLLAND COTTER, September 16, 2005

(...) 

Abstract drawings by Hiroyuki Doi, a Japanese artist born in 1946, are also products of trancelike concentration, but their method is free-form and incremental. Each design is built up from countless small-to-tiny black ink circles drawn in dense, foam-like clusters, with the clusters coalescing into larger forms that suggest mountains, galactic clouds or fleshy mounds.
Mr Doi's drawings evoke a whole lineage of cumulative circle-intensive art, led by Yayoi Kusama and Atsuko Tanaka. And to this he adds a specific personal motiviation. According to a wall text, he regards his pictures as exercises in cosmic and personal rejuvenation that he feels compelled to perform.

(...)

ニューヨークタイムス、2005年　９月16日（金曜日）

美術論評　「描きたい、描かずにいられない」　ホーランドコッテル記　

オプセシブ　ドローイングAmerican Folk Art Museum

1946年生まれの日本人のアーチストである土井宏之の抽象的なドロ－イングもまた、我を忘れてしまいそうな集中した状態のなかで製作されたものです。しかし方法としては、自由な形をとっており、量的に多いものがあります。それぞれのデザインは、数え切れない程の小さな、とても微小は丸 (サ－クル) が黒いインクで密集して描かれており、そしてたくさんの丸が集まって郡れをなし、そしてそれらがさらに集まってより大きな形を作っています。例えば、山脈や、銀河系の星雲や、人間の細胞の魂のようにも見えます。

土井氏のドロ－イングは、丸を多量に細かく描いている一連の作家、クサマヤヨイヤタナカアツコの芸術を思い起こさせます。これに、彼は個人的な特別な動機を加えています。美術館の展示会場に掲げられた土井氏に関する説明文によりますと、彼は自分の作品をこの宇宙での自分のなすべき仕事、そして喜び、と言っています。だから、描き続けなければならないと。

MAD HOT PENMAN As the American Folk Art Museum's "Obsessive Drawing" proves, you don't need an M.F.A. to make the kind of detailed marks that lead viewers to question your sanity. A math degree might help, however. Martin Thompson bases patterned diptychs on multiples of ten, patching mistakes with a scalpel and Scotch tape. Eugene Andolsek (detail of Untitled13A, pictured) uses a straightedge and compass. And Hiroyuki Doi inks circles representing "every creature ... which exists in this world" - an infinitive set, by the look of it.

Fall Preview New York, issue from September 12, 2005

"Hiroyuki Doi is a self-taught Japanese artist in his 60's whose solo show of ink drawings marks his first appearance in a gallery anywhere. His vocabulary has a single form, the circle, which he varies constantly in size from very small to nearly subatomic and masses by the thousands into into forms whose outlines, topographies and sense of inner light vary tremendously.
They usually suggest drifting nebulae or swirling galaxies, but can also resemble rough stone. They are delicate, mesmerizing and unusually beautiful, if not completely unusual, having the slight air of manufacture that can infect obsessive work. They would be even more beautiful without the artist's signature, which adds a saccharine note."

Roberta Smith, The New York Times, December 27th, 2002.

ヒロユキ　ドイは、独学で学んだ日本人の芸術家で、インクで描いた線画の個展を開催することで、60代になって始めて美術界に登場した。表現している言葉はたったひとつ、サークル、丸。大きさは常に変化し、陽子や電子のような非常に小さい丸から、何チ個が集団となって群をなす。形作る輪郭や、地勢、内部から出てくる光りには、非常に大きな変化がみられる。
ドイの作品は、漂流する星雲のようでもあり、渦巻く銀河のようでもあるが、また荒々しい石にも似ている。繊細で、催眠術にでもかけられたかのように魅惑的で、異常なほどに美しい。完全に異常なほどでないにしても、創造していくことが取りつかれる作品に影響を与えている。作家のサインがなければもっと美しかったことだろう。サインはサッカリンの甘さを加えているだけだから。ロベルタ　スミス

Report in the "art on paper" magazine by Edward Gomez

"Hiroyuki Doi is a self-taught Japanese artist who was born in Nagoya in1946. His first solo show in the United States presented his signature, untitled ink drawings in varied formats, from small works depicting single blob-like forms to larger, multi-panel pieces that recall ancient painted screens or hanging scrolls.
Doi, a master chef who works at a leading Tokyo hotel restaurant, began making drawings on washi paper and Arches sheets about three years ago. His technique amplifies and elaborates upon the simplest of forms - the circle - to create swirling, cloud-like shapes that float or tremble in the generous pictorial space of his abstract, meditative images. Using only black, fine-point, felt-tipped pens, Doi creates thickets of connecting, meandering circles, from tiny dots to sprawling agglomerations of bubbly, bobbing cells. The visual textures of the well-modeled forms belie the paper's flatness and each work's simple manufacture. Like relief maps otherworldly surfaces - they could be imaginary islands or oddly shaped planets - they pull a viewer's gaze in to explore the character and details of what look like lunar craters, eddies, ridges, or bays.
In the 1970s, Doi began visiting museums in Europe to teach himself about Western art history. Similarly, he familiarized himself with the structural, aesthetic, and stylistic traditions of East Asian painting. However, in his own work, the artist does not intentionally emulateany known technique or style. Coincidentally, though, the spirit of Doi's autodidactic art shares subtle affinities with that of postwar Japan's Gutai art movement.
The Gutai artists were pioneering performanceand installation artists, many of whom made experimental abstract paintings and works on paper that defied easy classification. Similarly, Doi's work falls into the broad, international tradition of ambiguously expressiv abstraction as appropriately as it does into the still-permuting category of work by self-taught artist that Phillis Kind has been investigating and bringing forward for more than three decades."

Edward Gomez in the "art on paper" magazine, Vol. 7, No. 6, April 2003, page 62