“What I do is not so much abstract, but wanting to get at the root of primitive. (…) The boards I paint, I sometimes think, are not pictures or works. I don’t want them to be paintings. I’m simply making movements to make sure I can do something. The multicolored paint becomes simplified and colorless, then the color of one’s body.” — Takeo Yamaguchi
Ookawashima Setting is a sublime painting by avant-garde Japanese artist Takeo Yamaguchi, executed in the later years of his distinguished artistic career. Yamaguchi’s paean to the ethereal landscapes of his homeland revisits the formative post-Impressionist influences of his youth. Impasto strokes texturise the landscape in vivid gestural marks, the soothing forms sharply interrupted by flat, bold red lines carving out mountains and rocks.
The minimalist composition echoes the abstract post-Cubist canvases for which the artist gained renown, but eschews their post-painterly severity. The result of his decades-long systematic inquiry into the framework and substance of objects, Yamaguchi comes full circle to pay fond tribute to the influence of the European avant-garde movements which drew Yamaguchi and his contemporaries to Paris at the start of their careers.
Provenance
Private Collection, Japan Bonhams, Hong Kong, 6 June 2017, lot 11 Acquired at the above sale by the present owner
Literature
Takeo Yamaguchi, The Works of Takeo Yamaguchi, Tokyo, 1981, no. 500, n.p. (illustrated)
signed, titled and dated '"Ookawashima Setting" 53rd year May 27 Takeo Yamaguchi [in Kanji]' on the reverse oil on board 15.9 x 22.7 cm. (6 1/4 x 8 7/8 in.) Painted in May 1978.