Imura art gallery, Kyoto proudly announce the launch of Makito Okada's solo exhibition on 9th June, 2012. With our first opportunity to run his first show at our gallery, we are going to present his new series with subjects of 'impatience, frustration and hope'. He draws motifs of alchemy, scientific experimentation and sea voyage as representation of universal state of mentality as anxiety for and escape from reality, longing for different worlds or past, and hope beyond them, with his distinguished technique. Applied vivid ultramarine blue over the exquisite depiction, the mysterious space constructed by a young yet skillful artist allures viewers to his creative world.
Even there was a romantic revival in the 20th century, "Sublime" probably is already an obsolete word today. Nevertheless, I consider it my job to verify the faithfulness of the great artists who aimed to it and restore such "aesthetics". Knowing that it could be called just a mere romantic passion of 18th to 19th century, I can't help longing for the moment to reach the world of calmness and profoundness, and touch the arising emotion.
I find it appropriate for the universality of romantic spirituality, ideas and emotion toward " sublime" to be treated with the oldest and simplest method. Painting is old and sorcery way with "appearance", "essence" and "correspondence".
Awe toward the nature, apprehension, fear, death, escape from them and longing for a different world and past, absorption in one's own world, hopes beyond tensed mentality. "Privation", that is to say "vacuity", "darkness", "obscurity", "solitude", "silence", "infinity" as Leitmotiv (leading motif) as Burke says, and sea voyage, storm, chemical laboratory in dim light, night, the moon as motifs… These are elements and requirements involved in my works.
Just as alchemists attempt to reproduce the material and immaterial world in test tubes in a dark laboratory, painters have been longing to discover the world in paintings and, despite their knowing they are just fragments of infinity, to preserve it as a proof. With reliving their experience, I explore to maintain such passionate feeling or disposition onto canvas.
What matters the most is how you keep the clarity and purity of works as paintings. The effect produced with dull color of graphite covered with varnish, and transparent blue organized with synthetic ultramarine as its base. To me this blue is a seductive that drags you into calmness and profoundness, and also a dangerous, severe and noble color that holds intensity in the midst of such calmness. This ultramarine blue keeps green and red in itself, which is suitable to express the state of mentality of fear and puzzlement about to sublime into a different emotion. What I do here might be just an act of applying transparent blue on canvas. But it is worth it, even it is fragmental and incomplete, if it turns out to be a proof of the universality of romantic spirituality.
by Makito Okada
