- Chasing Snow Upon the Retinas - Paintings for Measuring a Way of Life
- Nagahiro Kinoshita (History of Thoughts and Modern Art)
You stand before the painting. You move forward, slowly. Then you step back. You repeat these movements for a while, getting closer to the painting and moving away from it, as if groping your way, until suddenly... you find that special position. This is the place, your body tells you. No, itfs not your body that is mummering to you; itfs the painting, or rather the distance between you and the painting.
Itfs that distance that makes the painting touchable to me. As I look at the painting, my eyes touch it along my line of sight. Actually touch. Viewing Yasukifs paintings always requires touching them with your eyes. Or, to put it more precisely, they invariably invite anyone standing in front of them to participate in the pleasure of touching them with their eyes.
Humanity is only possible when a person lives and experiences human-to-human relationships. The sense of touch is the most primordial form of involvement in such relationships. Everyday life proceeds as normal without you really taking much notice of it, but once you have recognized the fact, you cannot help but start pondering over it. This is not limited to Yasukifs art, of course. Take for example a painter of apples. By representing the shape and hue of an apple, this painter is also trying to represent the feeling of being seized by the primordial, existential beauty of apples.
Masako Yasuki chooses to paint the esitesf of human lives, not apples. And unlike apples, sites are amorphous. Sites are a metaphor for the functions that change depending on the variables of time and terra firma - or the ground, land or earth, if you will. Yasuki transforms functions into paintings, or, conversely, paintings into functions.
At this point, inside the painter, the traditions of painting are reset: perspective and chiaroscuro become suspect, the conventions of Western and East Asian painting are reconstituted, and the painterfs whole body becomes focused on an act of creation primordial in time and place. And with this comes the struggle, the act of touching requisite for a human to become human, a drive that demands a response, no matter what. Thus, the process of painting is filled with thoughts of the primordial.
Making contact with such a primordial state can provide us with an irreplaceably precious sensation. But as with flakes of snow falling upon the corneas, the slightest heat can melt away perception by our retinas before our very eyes. Inevitably, relentlessly, unmindfully, customary behaviors of everyday life dissolve the valuable insights.
For Masako Yasuki, the act of painting is equal to recording the falling snow as it melts. She continues to paint, pursuing each fresh dusting as it alights, and swiftly dissolves. Her paintings are as such alive, and as you move your body back and forth before them, finding that special position where you can feel the breath of life within, you also find in the very act of measuring the distance, the offer of an answer to the question of how as human we might live in this moment of time.
Autumn 2020