「うたかたの庭」

上野の森美術館ギャラリー

2019

 

" Utakata no niwa "

The Ueno Royal Museum / Tokyo

2019

Text by Reiichi Noguchi (Chief curator of Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum)

In this solo exhibition at the Ueno Royal Museum, the painted plum blossoms were in full bloom as if the coming season was anticipated.
Red flowers are blooming in profusion against a backdrop of white clear space that makes me think of fine weather. The trunk is hardly drawn, it seems that it looks straight up at the flowers in the sky. Flowers are not appeared as isomorphic iterations as oftenly drawn in Japanese paintings, but are depicted in different colors, directions, appearances deliberately.Flowers are drawn in closer look than they actually are, and are painted so powerfully that never fails to impress. On the other hand, another flowers cause halation, and its contour has melted out into light. The gap between large and clearly drawn flowers and flowers looks like blending into the background creates visual contrast. There is a distance between the focused one and the blurred image. I do not know any other artists those who realize this kind of visual effect using the tools of Japanese paintings.

While using vivid colors without turbidity, it is said that such a contrast is created by a method of overlaying Japanese paper on colored surface. Instead of adjusting lightness and saturation by color mixing, soft paper coloring is realized while increasing lightness by applying Japanese paper on coloring. It should be said that it is a method of back coloring.

This artist's unique sensibility on color also realized in the series of portraits.The artist framed a woman's momentary natural expression skillfully and traced a vivid color scheme of overlaid coordination of her outfits skillfully. There is a certain visual unevenness between the depiction of facial expressions and clothes, which gives a sense of tension to the picture and complements the softness of the facial expressions.

Another point to note is that the artist has not left any contour lines. This also enhances the visual impression of the picture.
Artistic approach is completely different between a work depicting a flower and a portrait of a woman, and it is mysterious how it coexists within the artist, but the distances and effects caused by this contrast seem to be the key to understand this artist's expression.