Night Watch - A Line that Hits the Light

 The title of this exhibition, Night Watch, was inspired by Rembrandt’s The Night Watch. I still vividly remember the sense of astonishment and bewilderment I felt when I first stood before The Night Watch in Amsterdam. The raw presence and singularity of the painting radiated an overwhelming force unlike anything I had experienced before, and I found myself breathless in the face of its uncanny atmosphere.

 

 “What is this light?” I asked the painting, Rembrandt, and myself. As I hesitated before an image that did not depict what I thought I should be seeing in the way I expected to see it, I felt as though I had discovered a new version of myself.

The concept underlying my recent work is “coexistence through contrast,” as well as constructing a relationship of “touching and being touched” between painting and the person standing before it—the viewer—through the spatial breadth suggested by line, the luster and freshness of oil paint, and the sensuous bodily gestures evoked by brushstrokes and the thickness of paint.

 

 “Coexistence through contrast” refers to the relationships that emerge in moments when incompatible or opposing elements share time together. Through contrasts such as “supporting and being supported,” “bone and skin,” “hardness and softness,” and “architecture and the body,” I express the significance and beauty of existence revealed through opposition. For me, these images are abstract concepts that appear in a highly concrete form.

 

 In my paintings, images exist in a delicate state between representation and non-representation—between whether imagery is depicted or not, and whether meaning is formed or left unresolved. At first glance, the works may appear to be purely compositional constructions of line and plane. Yet viewers may sense the presence of figurative imagery, and some may even recognize something definite. This functions as a kind of “device”—an apparatus for constructing a relationship between the viewer and the painting. What we are convinced we are “seeing” may in fact be something entirely different. Through painting, I seek to question the gap between what is shown and what is perceived, and the relationship between seeing and cognition.

 

 One of my series, Perspective of the Body, which also lends its name to a new work, explores “perspective” not merely as a system of linear projection, but as a key concept for examining relativity—of distance, of time, and of their conditions—within the relationship between painting and the viewer standing before it. For me, painting is also a means of perceiving and recognizing my own body. Although people tend to believe that they are “recognizing a painting” by looking at it, I think that what is actually being perceived through the elements of painting—line, color, and so on—is the viewer’s own body. Standing before a painting, one must confront a body that wavers and remains unstable. As this sensation becomes sharpened, I feel that it allows us to share the meaning and joy of living, deepening our engagement with the aesthetic through art.

 

 My lines are not like geological layers piled one upon another. Rather, they cross and intertwine, aiming to present a single “natural state” across the entire surface of the painting. Before the swelling sense of space that seems to extend upward, downward, left, right—into the depths of the picture plane or beyond it—I hope that viewers are prompted to reconsider where they place themselves, how they constitute their own being, what it means to be near or far, and what constitutes a distant self or a proximate self.

 

 Within a single painting, I consider the tension between static and dynamic energies. I refer to this condition as a “neutral” state. In the new works Night Watch and Perspective of the Body – Autumn, 2015, the energy of the lines—previously inclined toward stillness—now shifts toward a more dynamic vector. By increasing the thickness of the paint as well, I aim for the painting as a whole to present greater strength while articulating more complex content.

 

 I am deeply drawn to the lines of Barnett Newman and Tawaraya Sōtatsu. Since high school, I have repeatedly visited Kennin-ji and Yōgen-in to see Sōtatsu’s works. At the time, the Rinpa school was not yet a fashionable term, and Yōgen-in was not widely discussed, yet I felt a strong sense of Kyoto’s reality in being able to view Sōtatsu’s paintings up close whenever I visited. I am particularly fond of the Bugaku Dance Screens at Daigo-ji. What captivates me about this work is that “we do not truly know what Sōtatsu intended.” In condensing complex and diverse content into the painterly language of line and color, parts were concealed or discarded, while at the same time an extraordinary degree of attention was devoted to both detail and the overall composition. As I look at the work, countless thoughts flash through my mind—some become clear, others vanish before I can grasp them. This stimulating state, I believe, arises precisely because the artist’s intent is clearly structured.

 

 This past May, I viewed Newman’s The Stations of the Cross for the first time in approximately thirteen years, since his retrospective at Tate Modern in 2002. I visited the Miho Museum twice, carefully tracing the traces of paint and brushwork in each of the fourteen paintings. Re-experiencing Newman’s process—from raw canvas to the final stage—allowed me to understand, in my own way, what Newman chose from among countless possibilities in order to express this profound subject. To give form to the enduring and far-reaching question of human suffering, Newman delivers a complex yet lucid and comprehensive statement through the seemingly simple elements of raw canvas and the colors black and white. What, then, is the difference between the territory expressed by Newman’s “zip” and my own “line”? I hope that a single line can ignite a beautiful light, generating a tactile sense of contact between painting and viewer.

 

11 September 2015

Naoko Watanabe
(Painter / Visual Artist)