小川佳夫 Yoshio OGAWA

A leaf blown by the wind, a bird flying in the air, a drop dripping silently, torrents of water—profound visual nuances that evoke poetic sentiments of such sights reside in Yoshio Ogawa’s paintings. A subtle stroke of a painting knife runs across a vast field of color. This creates an abstract image, a space, which continuously emits subtle reverberations while evoking a sense of the painter’s motions and their temporality. That everlasting sentiment arises in the viewer because Ogawa brilliantly found that single decisive moment in the painting process, that for him is crucial in producing a completed and finished work of art.

Yoshio Ogawa started his career as a serious painter in 1987 when he participated in Foundations of Painting, a group exhibition at Gallery Haku in Osaka, after graduating from Tokyo University of the Arts. In 1989 he began experimenting with paintings composed of the three primary colors, red, blue, and yellow, applied with vigorous brushwork reminiscent of abstract expressionism, particularly the work of Willem de Kooning, which he then covered in similarly vigorous strokes of black and white. The black and white strokes disappeared around 1992, replaced by atmospheric expanses of bright colors such as yellow, blue, and red which covered the entire surface of the paintings.

In 1995, Ogawa went to France, and continued to produce paintings there for 12 years until 2007. Having majored in oil painting at university and graduate school, Ogawa wanted to see oil painting in Europe, the birthplace of the art form, and fully experience first-hand the context in which the style developed. With this intention, and with the help of French acquaintances, Ogawa decided to go to Paris.

During his stay in Paris, he focused completely on finding his own style of painting without taking any interest in local trends or being influenced by any of them (at least not that he is conscious of). For the first several years Ogawa continued the style that he had been doing since 1992. Although the style was somewhat reminiscent of the works of Mark Rothko and other color-field painting artists, Ogawa says that while he did know of their works, he had never paid much interest in them and they had no influence on his own work. Rather, what Ogawa has always strived to do was to, in his own words, “never paint a painting similar to so-and-so’s ” and “express something that is unique to others, that is, to express something from the depths of myself.”

From around 2001, Ogawa began to apply various colors on canvas with, once again, vigorous brushstrokes. And toward the end of 2003, he established in Paris his own style which would lead to his present work—one or a few strokes applied with a painting knife over a field of color painted on canvas in oil with a brush.

Ogawa first mixes several colors on a canvas which generates a subtle nuance. Then he often applies a dash of another type of color over that and spreads it with a brush. This adds further nuance to the painting. The delicate texture and movements created by the traces of the brush result in a space pregnant with profound meaning that makes the viewer feel as if a looming light were shining toward him or her from the depths of the picture or as if the darkness were waiting for an observer in the depths of the picture. Ogawa says that he doesn’t anticipate or control any such effects before he begins to paint and that even if he intends to create an effect before painting, the result is never exactly as intended. It is something that arises spontaneously during the process of painting, and is gone the moment he lets himself become distracted.

Then goes the last sweep of the painting knife—sometimes it works well on the first try, and sometimes it doesn’t. If it doesn’t he paints over it with a brush until it blends into the background. That process brings another nuance to the painting. And another sweep of the knife is applied.

In paintings of his that give off an extremely deep nuance with only a few elements, there seems to be an aesthetic which evokes, for example, that of haiku. Ogawa might deny this, or he might not. It doesn’t matter whether he agrees or not, and I don’t necessarily have to limit the comparison to haiku (Ogawa himself once talked about the relation between his work and “negative space” typical of Japanese art), but in any case, I can see Ogawa’s Japanese sensibility manifested superbly in his abstract oil paintings on canvas.

That sensibility, however, was most likely something that was expressed on his canvas unintentionally, at least in the beginning. That is to say, instead of simply falling back on using something Japanese as a Japanese person in developing his own style during his stay in Paris, it happened naturally as he strove to “express something from the depths” of himself. Since then Ogawa has been harmonizing and integrating the occidental style of oil painting with Japanese aesthetics in complex and subtle ways, and continues to deepen his own pictorial expression.

I believe Yoshio Ogawa will keep painting in pursuit of that crucial moment in each creation and exploring new possibilities for his paintings which surely lie beyond these moments.

Tetsuya Oshima

Associate Professor,  Tama Art University

August 2015