小川佳夫 Yoshio OGAWA

It is difficult to put the recent paintings of Yoshio Ogawa into words.  Traces of a stroke applied with a painting knife on a field of color painted almost entirely uniformly―all his paintings are composed in this way, no more, no less. Though they have only the minimal compositional elements for a painting, the color tones and wavering strokes give each of his works its own unique expression.

Ogawa doesn’t paint a picture to create a certain shape. But then,what does he expect of a painting?  It is clear that his works are painted in two steps: first he paints a background, and then he applies a stroke with a knife.  We must note the fact that these two tasks are performed strictly in this order.  In his works painted in the 90s, the act of forming an all-over color field was done with repetitive brushstrokes in a spatial context. However, in his recent works, he produces a single temporal disconnection on the canvas.  He carefully prepares a color field, and a stroke intervenes into it in an instant. Through the action of the painter, a one-time event arises through the form of painting, thus expressing an event instead of a painting and a moment in time instead of space. This brings to mind another artist who dealt with the theme of time in his paintings, Barnett Newman, who said, “The concern with space bores me. I insist on my experience of sensations in time—not the sense of time but the physical sensation of time.”  Newman’s paintings, in which a thin vertical band called a “zip” is drawn on a huge field of color, share an emphasis on color fields and a simplicity of compositional elements with Ogawa’s paintings. And the episode in which Newman made his artistic breakthrough in 1948 with his work titled Onement,Ⅰ corresponds with the epiphanic experience Ogawa had in front of Jaillissement 2 which he painted in 2003.  Coincidentally, “Jaillissement”  is French for “outpouring”, as if implying the contingent and irreversible nature of Ogawa’s works.

For some time I have thought that Ogawa’s paintings, which depict images that look like wavering shadows or flowing water, might be a metaphor for “Let there be light”, —the words spoken by God in the story of the creation of heaven and earth in the Bible. But I will not discuss the relation between this association and Ogawa’s Christian beliefs here. The command “Let there be light” was the very event that drew a line between “the world before” and “the world after”, and it was God’s first act of creation. Newman also created a work which dealt with the theme of the separation between darkness and light titled The Command, before moving on to zip paintings.  But while Newman’s zips sharply divide the surface of the painting, Ogawa’s paintings appear extremely vibrant and sensuous. Through the one-time event of painting, images arise in Ogawa’s paintings that he calls “sceneries at the bottom of memories”, which are closely related to his own sensations and will. Newman detached his paintings from memories and associations, and offered them just to give to viewers “the sensation of space”. In contrast, Ogawa tries to reconstruct the artist, i.e. himself, through paintings— that is, events. Would it be too audacious to consider these images as a kind of self-portrait ?  Despite their similarity in form, Ogawa explores the possibilities of abstract expression in his paintings in a completely different way from that of the American abstract art which reached its apogee with Newman. I wonder if such a quest stems from his experience of painting continuously for 12 years in Paris.

Shinichiro Osaki

Chief Curator, Tottori Prefectural Museum