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A stopover in an eventful life

Japanese artist Hideaki Yamanobe exhibits at Galerie Biesenbach.

BY HEIDRUN WIRTH

The Japanese artist Hideaki Yamanobe visits the Biesenbach Gallery from time to time when he visits his studio in Cologne. Born in 1964, the artist is often travelling in Tokyo and Düsseldorf, the two cities where he studied. He is now presenting the timeless paintings with which he opened the gallery in 2012 for the eighth time at Biesenbach.

And as always, these mostly smaller formats are something like stopping points in an eventful life, where time and place seem to be suspended in the handling of paper, paint, brushes, pencils and canvas and reality disappears under many, many layers. Whereby the word ‘colour’ already refers to many-too-many, as the subtlest differences between ivory light and misty grey suffice, as does a wealth of black variations.

What is it that is created in many layers? Some call it pictorial meditation, others concentration, in which - from the artist's point of view - there is no coincidence, only a valid solution. But people from the Occident will perhaps hardly understand this when they see the fine clouds of colour in the ‘sound associations’. From temple bells to tsunamis.

But that which transcends all (verbally communicable) boundaries goes well with the sound. Yamanobe discovered Helmut Lachenmann's music for himself and designed the stage sets for Lachenmann's operas at the Salzburg Festival and also in Tokyo.

While you can immerse yourself in the various layers, you can feel that they counteract any provocative exaltation and radiate calm.

A calm that invites you to look at them again and again, changing your own state of mind and perception.

And you sense that the artist is more familiar with such changes than we can imagine when he reveals: ‘The place where I was born changed completely from one day to the next. It began in March 2011, when this city was first exposed to a major earthquake, a tsunami and then to radioactive radiation from the damaged nuclear power plant... They say it will still be contaminated 300 years from now.’ His birthplace is Fukushima.

And only now do viewers in the gallery realise the force of the changes. One understands the black rising and falling clouds of ink, the dark spots that lie on the thick, almost enamel-like painting ground, the X-ray-like shadows and the cautious penetration of lightcoloured, symbolic structures into the light. One understands: The pictures play with what is visible and with what is perhaps not yet or no longer visible. And yet the basic tensions between brightness and darkness remain. The process of creating each individual picture is slow and this makes everything seem precious, even the (deliberately induced) craquelure cracks in the colour on the background. But if you look at them, you can also see that these fine cracks come together to form a picture as a whole.