Goya Curtain presents genie in jar, an exhibition by Tokyo-based artist Ryuji Takahara.

Takahara moves between art, design, fashion and publishing. Alongside his visual art practice, he is one half of the Tokyo-based design studio well and a member of the independent publishing collective SAMY PRESS. Across these disciplines runs a shared attention to detail, craft and language.

For this exhibition, Takahara has assembled objects and elements of photography, painting and drawing in ways that evoke connections that emerge through the act of looking.

“My work explores how certain distances and spans of time can be received through the reassembly of objects and media in front of us.”

This attention to how meaning is formed and received extends to the exhibition title, genie in jar, which appears in Jeanette Winterson's novel Sexing the Cherry. She writes that “Paintings are light caught and held like a genie in jar.” The phrase originates in the tale of the Genie in a Jar from One Thousand and One Nights, but Winterson omits the article. This small shift in language renders the phrase slightly open and unsettled. Takahara is drawn to this form of productive misreading that leaves behind, or opens up, a particular residue of meaning.

“I tend to think of making work less as an active process of producing something and more as a question of how we receive things.”