Some of what has been said about Arakawa's work:
"I see nothing in these vast surfaces which is left to uncertainty, nothing at which the gaze could stop without being instantly recalled to the ordering of the whole. I would even go so far as to compare these monumental geometries to the preparatory constructs underlying the gigantic compositions of a Raphael or a Veronese. They lack only the legendary or historical episode which served as both occasion ornament. I repeat, nothing is more classic, in the Western sense of the word, than Arakawa's work and nothing, therfore, more syntactical, more stripped of asides."
-Jean-Francois Lyotard
'Arakawa's pictures are full of focal points, at which lines, planes, volumes, colors, forms and universes converge. His canvases are almost always large, but the space they project cannot be measured. The space is never homogeneous: here it is dense, there it is rarefied, here is a flat surface, there a stratification of the universes. "The edges that run all round the pictures are not so decisive, because they could well move further over, the picture could expand in all directions, could become infinite – I mean, infinitely expandable, though limited by its inner discontinuities. The same goes for the mind, which hides abysses in its folds."
-Italo Calvino
"Arakawa's panels require viewers if they are to be fully realized, for their truth exists in the space between them and us"
"Arakawa is one of the few masters in the art world, where the category of master has been forgotten and most people think of discipline as one of the kinkier outposts of sex."
-Arthur Danto
Arakawa was recently awarded the rank of "Chevalier des Arts et Lettres" by the Government of France.
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