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岡本秀（Shu Okamoto）によるテキスト〜石井海音個展「warp」／フカミエリ個展「fictional reality.」

 

Kaion Ishii Solo Exhibition “warp” / Fukami Eri Solo Exhibition “fictional reality.”

Exhibition Page
https://biscuitgallery.com/warp-fictionalreality/

 

Preface

Since 2019, I have been planning a research project called MIMIC. Through MIMIC, together with core member Yohei Kumano, I am exploring methods to describe the complexity that individuals carry, while preserving form as much as possible, through research and archiving of nearby artists.
Given that Kaion Ishii was the subject of the first project, this time I am contributing text to simultaneous solo exhibitions by Ishii and Fukami Eri.
Aware that this risks becoming unnecessary preamble, I would like to present a basic viewpoint. This will make the subsequent discussion easier to convey.

I love an artist’s personal technique. Through their work, I am very interested in thinking about that person’s unique scale, and the specific “incomprehensibility” that only that person can possess.

For example, in painting, the ability to draw sharp, clean lines is evidence of high technical skill. However, not everyone pursues such lines. Perhaps a thin, weak line is absolutely necessary for that person.
It is not simply weak. There is “this” weak line, and the artist is directed toward its specificity. This is a matter of technique [quality] that emerges at a level distinct from dimensions of novelty or public evaluation. And such distinctive “incomprehensibility,” while it may at first glance appear typological or immature, is fundamentally not self-indulgent.

Nevertheless, such an individual’s technique and values may be something that cannot be translated into the words of anyone else. Or, it may be something that “needs” to intentionally avoid being understood by others.
My fundamental concern is to consider a method of discussing an artist’s specificity not through emphasized individuality or constructionist contexts, but by presupposing such “incomprehensibility.”

Based on the above interests, I will observe the works of Ishii and Fukami.
At the same time, insofar as both artists continue active practice, I also wish to avoid drawing definitive lines about them. Therefore, the discussion will be somewhat tentative.

Since this is a simultaneous solo exhibition rather than a two-person show, I will write about each artist’s work individually without forcing connections between the two. As floors 1 and 2 feature Ishii and floor 3 features Fukami, let me begin by considering Ishii’s work.

Kaion Ishii Solo Exhibition “warp”

This time, Ishii is exhibiting portrait paintings. When I visited the studio, on a large canvas of about 100 号, several figure paintings in his usual style and a girl observing them were depicted. Around the artwork are small pieces that appear to be cut from the figure paintings depicted in the large work.
I see—the figure paintings within the image apparently line the actual exhibition space. Since Ishii has previously repeated motifs appearing in paintings through paintings-within-paintings and other works, I thought this was a natural development.
Ishii’s works are difficult to describe in their entirety because multiple elements intertwine in a scattered-reflection manner.
Nevertheless, if I were to extract one thing related to this exhibition, it might be good to think about signs and symbols.

For example, Peter Doig develops boats and grids across multiple works by switching how he paints them, their sizes, and the motifs he applies them to. Through this, the image of boats and grids becomes symbolized by Doig’s own hand. The boat becomes Doig’s symbol.
Similarly, in Ishii’s works too, images such as girls’ eyes, finger-pointing hands, ghosts, centaurs, and tulips repeatedly appear in multiple paintings. It is not strange to employ favored imagery frequently, but through the mediation of highly referential motifs such as paintings-within-paintings and mirrors, conscious symbolization is indeed taking place.
Also, symbols are deeply involved in the changes in Ishii’s recent creative approach. For example, in “Mirror 2” (2019), the tulips have a form like children’s scribbles. Just as most people would understand it to be the sun if one drew radiating lines around a circle, in this case the symbol means something close to a sign or emoji. However, in “Bunny Cactus’s Lack of Sunlight” (2021), presented at a solo exhibition in October 2021, plants (though not tulips) are depicted with more actual feeling than before. Regarding this change, an interview from June of that year comes to mind.

As things become symbolized and monotonous, things that absolutely should be done are also stripped away. It would be better if that happened later, but it hasn’t been that many years since I started painting. [Omitted] I think symbols have an aspect of becoming an escape, so I should be careful.
From MIMIC “Kaion Ishii Interview 2021” ([Omitted] is by the author)

Here it was a question of whether to paint the shadow falling on the frame, but for Ishii now, ignoring the expression that actual plants possess and painting based on atmosphere is also “slacking off.” It’s fine to do such simplification after becoming better at painting, but since he only recently started, he wants to be able to paint more different things.
Ishii’s point is very understandable, and it seems to have a good influence on his work. Moreover, to me this seems to demonstrate a close connection between the technical standard in Ishii’s work and the difference between sign and symbol. Let me draw one auxiliary line.

Alex Katz came to prominence in the 1950s and is frequently positioned as a Pop Art artist for painting illustration-like portraits. However, in an interview with Robert Storr, Katz reflects that he was interested in painting excellent paintings and was heading in a completely different direction from Pop Art. He then explains the difference from Pop Art from two angles.
First, Katz establishes the difference between sign and symbol. (Following the original text, English terms will be included from here on.)
For example, “a sign, if it’s a STOP sign, means ‘stop,’ and means nothing else.”
Sky is blue. A meadow is green. Pop Art, for Katz, was the use of such obviously clear images, in other words signs. Meanwhile, he says he was interested in something more complex.
That is symbol. Symbol does not converge into a single meaning but sways behind the portraits Katz paints. “Handling symbols, which are far more variable than signs”—this is one of Katz’s theses.
Next, Katz introduces technical standards. With the playful phrase “big technique” (if I were to translate it, something like “fucking huge technique”), it is unique to the artist, so I’ll quote it directly.

I was interested in the performance of painting. Pollock was quite good, but when I learned about Picasso’s “Girl Before a Mirror” (1932) and really understood how well he could paint… Actually, big technique doesn’t come until you’re about 35 or 40, no matter how good an artist you are.
Picasso’s early paintings were technical, and to me they were quite unstable. Even his great Cubist paintings don’t count as big technique. When he reached his 50s and painted “Girl Before a Mirror”—that’s big technique. To me it was absolutely wonderful, that was what I wanted to do.

Matisse has big technique. It took me 3 or 4 years to learn the proper way to view painting. At art school, a teacher said “look at Matisse.” There’s no way I could paint that well! Really, I was bowled over. That was big technique.

So that’s my mindset: big technique and small technique. Such a mind works in terms of creation and in terms of fashion and style. Pop painting has wonderful works, but my eye was directed elsewhere.
Carter Ratcliffe, Robert Storr, Iwona Blazwick, “Alex Katz:” Phaidon Press, 2007, 14-15
(Translation by the author)

In a previous interview, Ishii said he wanted to “throw his paintings far away.” Expressing that paintings should last for many years as throwing them far away is very characteristic of Ishii’s sensibility.
One can sense something like a subjective nuance of projecting work into a different temporal register than the present. Now, to a place different from here and there, like dice, the work is cast.
Works we usually see in museums are thus thrown into countless ages and yet have remained in the present. Certainly, people’s eye changes, and paintings age. Still, painting, in principle, lives a longer time than people. Across time and place, we encounter distant objects from the past.
In the title attached to the solo exhibition, along with moving between dimensions of pictorial space, one can sense Ishii’s quiet longing and wish toward painting that has endured distortions of spacetime in this way.

Symbol, from its etymology, means “to throw together / share.”
Sign, in the sense that Katz gave to Pop Art, possesses a provisional universality and is directed at the contemporary (from the word “to share time”) in that it exists with the consumption of the era. Symbol perhaps strikes against the possibilities that sign possesses and throws it into another phase.

In the paintings Ishii speaks of being “thrown far,” there surely dwells such power as symbol and the technique that Katz calls big technique. And Ishii’s paintings may be directed toward that.

Finally, in Ishii’s works, there is always one invisible sign. It is gaze. As Doig self-symbolizes the boat, Ishii symbolizes the motif of closed or vacant eyes. And those eyes are identified by the ephemeral quality and warmth unique to Ishii’s painting.
The gaze symbolized by Ishii’s hand wanders through the painting via mirrors, paintings-within-paintings, windows, and sometimes through gestures, hand movements, and lines made with piping bags. The girl’s eyes (sign) are a symbol thrown back to viewers by the existence of such a gaze.

 

Fukami Eri Solo Exhibition “fictional reality.”

Contrary to the first impression of the picture surface, I know few people who express the experience of reality as frankly as Fukami does.
For example, when one is “startled so much you jump,” in reality you do not actually jump. But if one were to paint it, would not painting a figure that has jumped accord better with the sense of reality [reality] one has encountered?
Fukami attempts to narrativize the reality thus intuitively grasped with almost no embellishment.
The fact that there are multiple Fukamis in the painting, or that her own image is projected into her grandmother’s reminiscence, is because it accords with Fukami’s internal sense of reality [reality].

However, Fukami’s works cannot be resolved by realistic issues alone.
Many of the images seen in Fukami’s paintings evoke distant memories, dreams, and primordial experiences preserved in the unconscious.
From the appearance of naked figures, psychological images concerning human creation such as Adam and Eve, and intimate spaces such as family and you and me, are tied together. (“Reminiscence” (2022), “Life Spun” (2021), “Only Me” (2021))
Observing this carefully constructed virtual world, one is seized by a sensation as if unconscious images (the origin of self) and primordial images (the origin of the world) connect at one point. Fukami says that dying is returning. Seeing life and death, self and other, within one continuous cyclical process is involved in the worldview of Fukami’s paintings.
Were you and I originally one? Did we come from some one place?
Fukami’s works are a place where such world-recognition [reality] and the experience of reality [reality] meet as one.

Because multiple times, multiple points, and multiple worldlines coexist in a single painting as lived experiences, Fukami’s picture surface is chaotic.
To fix scenes produced from the brain to the picture surface in as lived a state as possible requires completing works at a speed approaching the transmission speed of synapses. “The Day the Moon Was Very Beautiful” (2022) was completed in about two hours.
Inevitably, the picture surface reveals highly saturated colors and raw brushwork with emphasized subjectivity. The symbolic expression of human motifs may also indicate that there is an appropriate resolution that the body can easily capture, rather than formalist interest.
Moreover, in these expressionistic characteristics, there are similarities with painters of the same generation such as Shinya Azuma and Miho Iida. However, Azuma seems to employ more ironic and self-deprecating representation, while Iida employs a self-referential attitude toward self-reference, and seems to meta-examine cultural frameworks before folding back to pictorial technique.
Fukami’s works do not have such strong adherence to cultural determinacy. To put it subtly, she jumps over institutional problems and deals with mythical ones.

Still, when something is this close to sketching, isn’t the difference from drawing nearly eliminated? When I asked Fukami, she said it’s actually almost no different. Rather, drawings are more finished, and in them her “memory and reality being connected is more apparent.”
Then why oil painting? Summarizing Fukami’s answer as follows.

Drawing with crayons she has used since childhood and is familiar with would allow her to produce consistent quality every time. However, with oil painting, the quality of the work changes with the physicality of the body. In the real world, one-time events happen every day. You can only respond to each situation as it comes. Oil painting is the best medium for this. Paint is fluid, and the color saturation and spread of oil change each time. She uses inorganic pigments for living things and organic pigments for dead things, and depending on the situation at the moment, what she uses changes, and the image changes accordingly.
(From notes of a prior interview)

In this case, the difficult-to-handle oil paint is likened to contact with the external world and others. By mediating such otherness, the self and the work are necessarily called upon to transform.
Otherness is presupposed in Fukami’s subjectivity [reality].
This point is important. From the characteristics so far, Fukami appears to be painting “her own” inner world. On the other hand, Fukami also calls that “self” from outside.
Naturally, since she shows work in the public space of an exhibition, Fukami is self-aware of a self in which the eyes of others are woven. The narrative [reality] Fukami creates exists in the gap of intoxication open to negotiation with others.

Nevertheless, such subjective-ist painting forms invite criticism.
Hal Foster questions the way of thinking about “the unconscious” that people prioritizing inner expression treat as privileged. And he considers that expressionists are naive or behaving with self-deprecation regarding how the self is constructed culturally from the stage of inspiration and motivation. According to Foster, the intuitive expression handled by such artists is merely one type already fully coded by existing art history.
This view is criticism that has been uniformly leveled at artists who emphasize expression (or existence).
In fact, Fukami’s works have a danger of appearing like something seen before somewhere.
For example, in the point of giving direct form to personal existence and emotion, painters of prior generations such as Masato Kobayashi, Hiroshi Sugito, OJUN, and Rei Ikemura do the same thing. While this is strictly an associative matter in terms of ideology, parts of it also apply to concrete expression. For example, the depiction of trees in Fukami’s “Gray Homeland” (2022) is reminiscent of OJUN’s exhibition “The Startled Me Watching Flying Pigeons,” and the pencil touch is reminiscent of Sugito’s “three roofs.”
Whether such similarities appear in the dimension of affection and influence or result in inferior worldview depends on the strength of Fukami’s own work. On the other hand, the immediacy of fixing images in their raw state necessarily risks leaving the painting roughly symbolic. As stated in the previous text by Ishii, symbolization also leads to monotonization. Here, deciding where to land technically is a difficult problem, is it not? This is a simple matter of the cat that appears in “When I Remembered” (2022) being hard to recognize as a cat at first glance, or the lively rustling of the flowers not quite coming across. Whether it is better because Fukami’s reality is sufficiently expressed or whether it would be better to paint in a way everyone understands is unclear. However, even Edvard Munch, Marc Chagall, or Miriam Kahn seem to paint with good balance.
That said, Fukami herself may have already set a direction. There is change in how the figures are depicted. What was at first consciously painted symbolically (SUKI (2022)) gradually becomes richer, with expressions appearing on faces and decorative objects being added.
My doubts notwithstanding, Fukami will easily overcome Foster’s criticism as well.

Now, in this text, I have read “reality” in various ways: as sense of reality and world-recognition.
When I asked Fukami what she would translate “reality” as herself, she answered “chaos.” She was hesitating between “truth,” so if I asked today I might get a completely different answer. But “chaos” makes perfect sense.
The reality Fukami has experienced mixes internal sensation, recognition of the world, and memory, and through contact with the external world such as paint and canvas, creates a narrative world.
Multiple lives [reality] are lived in one flat world.
Indeed, chaos [reality].

⚡ AI Translation