On Kawara, began the series "Date Paintings". Each dates paintings is part of the "Today Series" and consists of a small rectangular panel thoroughly monochrome, on which are painted in white only the letters and numbers that make up the current date.
The drafting of the background color and the white enrollment respect a protocol meticulously prepared and strictly observed. In the case where the painting has not been
Each painting of On Kawara on the "Today Series" is titled the date that is inscribed and subtitled a sentence from a newspaper of the day; the picture is stored in a cardboard box, labeled with the date and lined on the inside with a clipping from a newspaper read by the artist during the day.
In his series "I Got Up" artist Daily, two postcards with the exact time indication of where it is located, to acquaintances and friends, that read the symbolic phrase: "i am still alive."
On Kawara maintains this method of communication from 1968 to 1979, where the artist is given by his conscience awakening coinciding with the demonstrable fact of his being alive, indicating the date and place.
Another important work of the Japanese artist is "One Million Years" are big books that contain only the dates. The books are divided into two parts, one called Past containing in numerical order regression thousand years into the past and the other party called Future enclosing the dates of future thousand years to come.
This work of On Kawara is the obsession of the artist for the time, reading the pages of "One Million Years" by listening or by volunteers who read the pages, as was done during the presentation of the project in New York, there will realize how small we are in comparison with this work.
Our life is short but contained only one or two pages of the book and this makes us think. But the work itself creates and at the same time, neutralizes the fear of the passing of the years that are spending; changing the dates only in numbers, so as to frustrate their meaning and making them only the digits.
On Kawara manages to turn his work into a storm system that continues without interruption until his death, similar to the art project described earlier by Roman Opalka.
completed by midnight on the day it was started, it is destroyed. The thoroughness of the rigorous frameworks of On Kawara we can find in my project Encase Time, in the composition of 18x24cm squares in their principle of progression over time.
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