Hideaki Yamanobe: The Peak

Opening: Saturday, October 11th, 11 am
The artist will be present


Hideaki Yamanobe, The Peak
 
In his paintings, Hideaki Yamanobe develops a silent, almost meditative world of images. By means of nuanced gradations of white and grey on a black grounding he creates abstract spaces that intimate more than they specify. Associations rise up from the surfaces of these images like mist in autumn, forming a shape for a moment before disappearing again into indeterminacy.

Yamanobe’s works combine a contemporary, minimalist pictorial language in a quite remarkable way with the traditions of east Asian landscape painting. His paintings exude the spirit of the ‘haboku’ ink-wash technique that evolved in 15th century Japan, that “broken” form of painting in which shapes are forever dissolving. What is key is the conscious use of empty space (‘ma’) as a creative tool. These lacunae are not merely absence but through their contrast to the shape depicted create a subtle tension that kindles the imagination and encourages contemplation. While the masters of the Muromachi period always relied on actual themes such as representations of the landscape, Yamanobe remains firmly committed to abstraction.

Nevertheless, his paintings invite the viewer to let their eyes wander over the surface as if across a snowy plateau high up in the mountains. Spontaneously painted, translucent layers of paint form diffuse structures reminiscent of wisps of fog, lines of clouds, or rock formations. Despite the immense reduction, we can sense in them the sublimeness of the Alpine world, and thus those moments of clarity and silence that the artist himself experienced when climbing the Zugspitze and Mont Blanc. The color surfaces condense to form a landscape that for its part becomes a metaphor: The mountain not only stands for itself as a natural form but as a symbol of life per se. This is like the effort of slowly making your way up stoney slopes, the path uncertain. That long striving for the peak, reaching the summit as the moment of triumph and of the greatest happiness, to invariably be followed by the descent down into the depths. This ambivalence resonates in the Japanese concept of ‘mono no aware’: the melancholic awareness of the beauty of the fleeting and the transience of all things.

Yamanobe’s aesthetics of reduction is rooted in the Japanese art tradition as the expression of intellectual depth and sincerity. When viewing his works one is caught in the tension of formal silence and the inner power of the images that prompt both contemplative immersion and existential reflection simultaneously.
 
Xenia Ressos