''Colors without matter don't exist. I think the first thing to do is to free colors from the paint brush. If you are creating something and you don't throw away the paint brush you have no possibility to develop colors. Without paint brushes colors live for the first time. You can use successfully whatever kind of mean instead of the paint brush."
In Shimamoto’s action painting, in his erotic splashes of paint directed against painting itself, the ritual of the gesture serves to exorcise reality and return to the organic and dynamic origins of life. Only the gesture of art can draw the desperate movement of existence into its own vortex, thus realizing, in condensed and separate moments, the totalizing paradises and cycles of its own humanity. Outside these moments of totality, the artist lives immersed in the dimension of everyday life, unable to overcome the separation between one human being and another, and between humanity and things. Yet it is understood that the discontinuity of existence belongs to the structural laws governing the world, and that the blindness of chance composes and decomposes every human act.
The visible chaos of things faithfully reproduces the subterranean movement upon which the further movement of appearances unfolds. The artist must accept a life that is permanently unbalanced and open to all the currents of possibility. Only through this acceptance can the gesture of art attune itself to the universal movement and, in an epiphanic moment, grasp fragments of a true and complex existence. The impasse does not stem from a sense of frustration, but from the awareness that only in the moment of artistic creativity does an effective synchrony with the world and the rhythms of its movement come into being.
Excerpt from Painting is the Duration of the Action by Achille Bonito Oliva