Naoto Kumagai solo exhibition

Last spring, Art front Gallery exhibited the new work Naoto Kumagai for the first time. The show consisted of a gigantic work titled Three Forests with small pieces surrounding it. Partly because of space restrictions, the exhibition could not demonstrate the full extent of this artist’s capacities, but many works showed trees floating on meticulously produced, complex, white backgrounds. The trees emerged from white mist, giving the impression of seeing the dense forest in shining monochrome from Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Ivan’s Childhood, but now suddenly in colour. I remember this as a mysterious visual experience akin to dizziness.

No two trees are the same, yet we recognise them all as being just that ? a tree. This means we have unconsciously absorbed the notion of ‘tree’ and use that information to designate whatever falls into that category as ‘a tree’. Trees painted by artists skilled at rendering them, such as Maruyama Okyo or Tamaki Funada, while looking like trees, also look like something completely new, surpassing our general notion of ‘tree’. This is precisely because we are not dependant on the forms of real trees to understand the notion of ‘tree’. As he noted in an interview last year, Kumagai conceptualises familiar trees and forests, and recomposes them in his paintings: he does not seek to depict actual trees realistically. I believe it is this that enables his trees to emerge in front of us as something entirely unfamiliar. He is able to present trees which are utterly unknown, to the extent they cause the viewer, as I said, to feel dizzy.

In this exhibition, Kumagai’s work seems to have reached a new horizon. Most of it no longer looks as if he is depicting trees at all, but rather, we see stripes across the picture plane, from top to bottom. In actual fact, unless we look up we are unlikely ever to see a whole tree, from the roots to the tip of its branches. But we are well able to recognise trees just by their trunks. Kumagai’s new work seems to have brought us nearer to this experience of human vision. He gives us what are almost abstract paintings of just coloured lines and backgrounds. The distance between the lines and the backgrounds vanishes, and the works start to emphasise their two dimensionality. But this planar effect is painted on relief surfaces and the sides of cubes. I hope you will appreciate this work by Naoto Kumagai which reveals him to have entered a transformative phase, and to have reached a new horizon.