Makoto Fujimura, Sublime Mystery
Christine Cavallomagno
"We now begin to realize what we do is only temporary and indefinable. Incomplete gestures must be made, because reality beckons us to respond. Beauty, however peripheral, insists that we remain faithful to who we are, as we are." -Makoto Fujimura’s essay, "Gravity and Grace", October 2001
In attempting to do what is "temporary and indefinable," Japanese-American artist Makoto Fujimura has managed to create art that is both monumental and human, works that in their fragility point toward hope and permanence. He began working on his latest series of paintings, Water Flames (on exhibit at the newly opened Sara Tecchia Roma New York Gallery in Chelsea), shortly after September 11th, 2001 and the work bears the fingerprints of these events while recording his meditation on a world changed by terrorism and war. The paintings are at once stunning in their silence and yet invite us into a kind of contemplative relationship that straddles the border between art viewing and spiritual pursuit. Consisting of human-scale paintings on paper, with no glass barrier to prevent an intimate connection with the work, Fujimura’s works are an expression of an existential leap of faith, the kind that allows one to live in the desolate situation of war, political tension and anxiety while infiltrating those realities through a meditation on the journey. As founder of the International Arts Movement (the members of which attempt to integrate artistic integrity with their desire for spiritual renewal), his art reflects the notion of piercing the veil of physical reality and attempting, through painting, to convey that which is beautiful and sublime.
For Fujimura, the works are a visual treatment of the poetry of T.S. Eliot, whose The Waste Land (1922) found its resolution in the Four Quartets, which Eliot wrote in 1943. Both poems focused on the idea of a journey, not a linear progressive one, but a voyage inward to find the point of stillness despite the ongoing turmoil of the first and second World War.
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
-T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
Fujimura infuses his work with this idea of the "point of stillness." For both Eliot and Fujimura, it represents a critical moment in their Christian belief, i.e., the mystery of the Incarnation, where there was a meeting of earth’s physicality and the presence of God. Gazing at these paintings, there is a sense of stopped time, of a meeting between earth’s elements and sublime beauty. Stillness is similarly interpreted in the tradition of Japanese art, with the solemnity of nature at the heart of visual representation. Fujimura draws on this tradition in his treatment of the essential elements of nature: earth, fire, air and water. To evoke these elements, he uses pigments found in Medieval painting such as vermilion, azurite, cochineal, silver and gold. These earth minerals are floated over the surface of the paper in water as Fujimura manipulates the Kumohada paper, made especially for the project in Imadate, Japan. For Fujimura, the process of creating necessitates that he become actor as well as artist. Because of the large scale of these paintings, he must engage them on a very physical level, pouring water and minerals across the canvas and then quickly drying them with a tool he uses to control the pigment that forces hot air across the surface. Thus the themes of fire, earth, air and water are not just the subject of the works, but the process and method as well.
His gorgeous monochromatic works recall ancient landscape paintings, such as those of Tohaku Hasegawa, whose 16th century landscape paintings Fujimura cites as a major influence. Hasegawa’s pine tree paintings are said to evoke the experience of listening to the air rustling through the trees rather than viewing them. The Zen idea of capturing the core of nature by somehow conveying that spirit through the work of art, rather than simply capturing reality as it appears, is a concept that permeates Japanese painting and is clearly present here. Fujimura has spoken of his work as being very difficult to photograph; the essence is contained not in the arrangement of forms in space, but in the mystery conveyed through the work as a whole.
As a point of departure for these works, Fujimura was fascinated by paradox of T.S. Eliot’s poetic phrase, the "knot of fire," and his work evidences his fascination with flames that somehow fold in on themselves. The portrayal of fire in Western art has often been jarring or violent, the source of judgment and destruction. Fujimura cites fire as "at once recognizable and yet mysteriously abstract at the same time." He attempts to go beyond the ubiquity of fire symbols and images in contemporary society and convey its essence as one of mystery; a source of life and power as well as death. Water Flames Vermilion I and II captures fire’s more violent personality on enormous canvases of crimson. They are not, however, jarring or disturbing. There is a sense of finding oneself in the midst of the flames, but not being engulfed, like the burning bush of the Judeo-Christian scriptures, which Fujimura cites as a principal source of inspiration. In these bold works, he manages to hint at that "point of stillness" even in the flames.
Water Flames Silver and Water Flames Azurite posit air and water as counterpoints to the dominant fiery red canvases interspersed throughout the exhibition. The silver ground recalls the metallic ground of Byzantine and Medieval panel painting while paying homage to one of Fujimura’s teachers, Nihonga master Matazo Kayama, whose use of these metals in his work drew from his belief: "The weight of gold and silver will capture even the passage of time herself. So one could find, within the visual space created by gold and silver, a moment of eternity." The visual climax of the exhibit is Water Stones. This work, although quite a bit smaller than the rest of the show, contains both the emotional storm of the vermilion works and the calm before the storm evoked in the silver and azurite works. The enveloping landscape is undulating while remaining still. The lightness of Hasegawa’s influence is most present here, along with forms that are almost recognizable as elements of nature, but nevertheless move beyond the reductionist language of abstract painting.
Ultimately coming away from the exhibition, one comes to understand that Fujimura’s paintings are about redemption and sublime beauty. He dares to articulate such long-lost concepts in the language of organic mystery and allows the viewer a rare glimpse of beauty and a chance to participate in the journey, briefly discovering the still point between the leap and faith.
