Masaaki Hasegawa (Tokyo, 1987) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work has been developed in Madrid for over 10 years, a city he leaves and returns to for different projects. He arrived in the capital in 2012 to pursue the Master's in Visual Media Communication at IE Business School, motivated by the synaesthesia that has shaped his perception of reality since childhood. This neurological phenomenon — which in Masaaki Hasegawa manifests through colours in different situations — has made his understanding of life fundamentally colourist. He developed an early relationship with the concepts of aesthetics and creativity, first as a literary author, and for several years now expressing them through his painting. With books such as New Paradigm of Creativity (IGI Global, 2017) and SOUZOU: a method for developing ideas (Advook, 2019), Masaaki Hasegawa theorises on different formulas for drawing out our greatest potential, putting these techniques into practice in his painting.
At the beginning of his career, his way of creating was strongly shaped by Japanese tradition, reformulating this inheritance through a calligraphic style in which he wrote ideas into the letters themselves. In this period he undertook major projects such as painting the rooftop of Zapadores in 2018, creating the largest calligraphic work in Europe. His style was marked by the principles of abstract expressionism — working with space and time, and with the expression of feelings, in the manner of Pollock. This, combined with the calligraphic technique, led him to research figures such as Cy Twombly, and to take an interest in other synaesthetic artists such as Kandinsky, developing a self-taught education that has grown organically through museum visits and personal inquiry. This process and these experiences give rise to an artistic practice now centred on painting and performance as an activation of the process — bringing the creative act from the studio into the exhibition space and inviting the viewer to take part in the creation. Guided by synaesthesia, Masaaki Hasegawa attempts to translate onto canvas his vision of reality, where both sounds and situations emanate colours. With a preference for large formats, his work is part of public and private collections including the Contemporary Museum of Calligraphy (Moscow, 2018), IE Business School, the Kyiv Academy of Media Arts and the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts (Kharkiv, 2019). For several years he has organised his creation into distinct blocks defined by how he approaches each body of work: Flower Rites, Obsession and Transition. In Flower Rites, the work is marked by the material used to create it — applying paint with the hydrangea flower, which is put through a ritual of appreciation before being used as a brush, and at times incorporated into the piece, venerating it before its death. With Obsession, the name itself signals the concern: a body of work shaped by obsession, creating 50 pieces through the same movement — an automatic painting that emerges from the small failures. Finally, in Transition, Masaaki Hasegawa sets painting aside to seek new means of creation, focusing on a constant of his practice — the passage of time — burning a rose and then encapsulating only half of it, letting time do the rest.
In this way, Masaaki Hasegawa's work draws on certain cultural principles brought from his Japanese origins in order to emancipate itself from that tradition and search for a language of its own. The idea of beauty as something transitory, or the appreciation of the ephemeral as a moment that passes and cannot be captured, converges with today's moral ambiguity, impermanence and obsession to create these works — small capsules of emotion. His main aim is to externalise this inner world, leaving enough space for each viewer to complete these compositions with their own emotions.
