LOS ANGELES

Takako Yamaguchi’s mesmerizing series of new large-scale oil and bronze leaf paintings on canvas both reduce and complicate the dynamics of space and light in the landscape tradition. Conventions of rendering the forms of nature using the idiom of geometrical abstraction and distilled color ranging from Vasarely’s luminous, psychedelic smoothness to Mondrian’s jazz-infused structuralism, German Expressionism’s sharp-edged steeliness, and Escher’s jovial optical gymnastic patterns each form a part of the foundation from which the artist creates her hyper-stylized renditions, which literally reach from the earth up to the heavens. One of the most compelling aspects of Yamaguchi’s work is the degree of diversity of visual experience she makes available to her viewers. Her works impart a wide-ranging selection of landscape vistas from open sea to snow-covered mountain ranges and all manner of weather conditions, using a relatively limited lexicon of triangles, sine waves, striated horizontal lines, oblong lozenges, rounded mounds and rhomboids, as well as a circumspect but finely parsed palette of blues, greens, browns, whites, and the all-important gold leaf, which she tends mainly to deploy as an atmospheric spark rather than a dramatic gesture.

For example, in The Landscape, the Weather and That (2007), the gold is stretched as thin as a membrane across a horizon line separating rolling hills and waves of earth as lithesome as Rousseau’s giant ferns, the sky laden to the point of bending with great, bluish-white challah braids of smooth-edged cloud matter. The pinch of gold catches the eye and singes a moment of the light’s transition that lends depth and distance to the vista. In other works, such as Reunion with Reality (2008) and especially Post-Romantic (2006), where the gold leaf is more prominent (in both cases used to render the clouds) the effect infuses the sunset over hyperbolic peaks with a surprisingly naturalistic warmth, which evokes the surrealism of “the magic hour” and the chromatic tricks distance can play on the eye. In the end this is Yamaguchi’s great gift, to use a language of absolute artificiality to create a regimented vision of the world suffused with sensual realism.

“Add This to Rhetoric,” 2008, Takako Yamaguchi,Oil and bronze leaf on canvas, 68" x 78"
Photo: courtesy of Cardwell Jimmerson