Aki EimizuPrevious painting, by which I mean Western painting and
painting that follows in the Western tradition, has frequently attempted to
depict light as such. And some works seem to contain their own internal light.
This interest in light may be due to the fact that color cannot exist without
light.
It may also arise from our inability to forget an older
memory of painting as a window through which light shines.Or is it related to the whiteness of the
canvas or the light reflected by the flat surface that most artists see when
they begin to work?
If the former is true, painting is an act of capturing
light outside the pictorial surface. If the latter it is a way of gradually
diminishing the amount of light flowing over the white support by applying
paint.
Eimizu Aki’s paintings do something different from either
of these approaches. They do not seem to weaken the inner light but actually
strengthen it as much as possible. At the same time, no matter how intricately
the surface is manipulated, these pictures never get close to the condition of
being nothing but physical matter. The picture plane takes on ambivalent depth,
making the picture into a special entity that seems to emit light.
I do not know what sort of new work Eimizu will produce
for this exhibition. I imagine that viewers will find themselves gazing at fine
dots and curved lines that appear from a place beyond the canvas while bathing
in the light they emit. These hazy, faint images might be described as signs.
Because of the nature of the images, the viewer will not read a narrative in
them. This is the sort of painting that may lend itself to association with
personal memories that have been forgotten.
Standing in front of the painting one is enveloped in
pure white light. Following the signs, it is possible to project one’s thoughts
toward something far away. The time spent with this painting will be extremely
pleasurable.
Maeyama Yuji
Curator, The
Museum of Modern Art, Saitama, Tokyo
Nobuaki Onishi
Nobuaki Onishi created objects by
casting transparent resin into moulds which were made out of objects found in
our daily life. Onishi then skilfully painted parts of his work in order to
replicate a realistic look of the objects, and this leads his work to become a
unique piece of art. He makes art which is hard to tell if it was real at first
sight. He is interested to see how viewers respond to the superficial
appearance of the objects and how they distinguish the artificial objects from
the real.
This is something that happened to my
mother in the past. Someone witnessed her in a completely different place from
where she as a person exists. I had no sense of fear or curiosity of the occult
towards this so-called doppelganger effect, but the fact that the presence was
there at all felt more real to me then my mother who actually spoke and
breathed.
My work consists mostly of using casting
and woodblock printing techniques with resin, to scrape off the surface of an
object, and then transitioning it to a different material through the
application of colours that are indistinguishable from the real thing. For
example, in using glass as the motif in my work titled (garasu), it has a
surface that is as close to glass as one could achieve, and yet, is an object
that exists as a completely different entity from glass, torn apart between
these two bodies. The clearer the glass, the clearer the images of the scene
opposite transferred to this side, and vice versa with equally clear images of the
scene on this side reflected and shown. In other words, it is a unique object
that exists in an ambiguous territory, in which the more transparency there is,
the more tension there is.
Glass attains its most elevated material
texture when it cracks, shatters into smithereens, or occasionally cuts my
hand. Superbly accurate work lies in extracting only the surface details of the
glass and nothing more. That surface is not converted into something else, nor
is there any verbal sharing of emotions or a theme for making the right
judgment. However, there is no denying the fact that the exact same surface as the
glass is present, along with the dissimilarities.
When the object is transformed into
another object, with all of its human relationships severed even while retaining
the same surface as glass, its presence becomes “nothing.” Because it no longer
exists as
something this or something that, it
actually becomes more powerful, engaging the humanistic senses and memories, as
if to become a container for all kinds of consciousness to flow into. Just like
the Japanese sense of nature, things lying around like rocks or shards of glass
at times become the memory of weightiness, at times become humor, and at times
become paranormal entities. This could be described asthe doppelganger transformation of all
things and facts.
Nobuaki
Onishi
