Japanese artist paints Gothic Kafka in Prague • RESPECT
When I saw Moemi Yamamoto’s diploma thesis at the Academy of Fine Arts in June, I included it among the works of the six greatest talents of the year and I wrote, that it “would be excellent news for our art when it would permanently settle here and continue to enrich its canon in such an original way”. My wish is starting to come true after half a year. Yamamoto opened the Bold Gallery exhibition in Prague on Tuesday Yumor Dreams, which – I think – catapults the Japanese artist among the most original and unmissable authors of our current scene.
In the summer, I wasn’t the only one captivated by her diploma. Immediately after the exhibition, curator Radek Wohlmuth contacted the painter saying that he would like to collaborate with her on a separate exhibition. He had no idea that at the same time, Yamamoto also approached Bold Gallery owner Oldřich Hejtmánek with the same offer. It was discovered when all three of them met in Bold at two independently scheduled meetings. “We just both fell in love with her without knowing it,” says Wohlmuth of the spontaneous connection, which requires what even a layman will immediately recognize in the paintings: “Nobody works like this here, let alone the younger generation.”
Moemi Yamamoto is thirty-seven. In her native Japan, she graduated from Tohoku University of Applied Arts, then worked for a company for which she created illusion paintings. She was tempted to live in Europe for a while, and when she was thinking about which city to choose, she fell in love with Prague thanks to the work of Franz Kafka. The city enchanted her, she started to learn Czech and since she wanted to advance in her work, she applied to AVU. She entered the painting studio of Josef Bolf and Jakub Hošek. “I used to paint such darker pictures, Bolf and Hošek also helped me with their perspective,” describes the author’s three-year experience with her master’s degree, who works with perspective in a phenomenal way.
It combines the peculiar Japanese parallel perspective, where parallel edges do not converge, with the European Gothic flat display tradition. Remarkable situations arise in this way, when cupboards with natural objects have drawers that contradict the laws of nature, windows apparently cannot be closed, and ladders lead to places that should logically be lower than where a person climbs the steps. In addition, scenes with strangely confused characters have an absurd Kafkaesque atmosphere, which makes Yamamoto’s work recognizable at first glance.
“I don’t solve it geometrically, but intuitively,” explains the author, why each of her paintings has its own spatial rules. Sometimes the interior finds itself in the exterior, other times it’s the other way around. It has a truly dreamlike effect, which in the current exhibition is helped by the inclusion of props in the form of real natural objects, a model of a hand, a tailor’s virgin or a tree in a flowerpot. Illusion passes into reality, reality into illusion. For the exhibition, Yamamoto painted twenty new canvases in which she quotes her own dreams and combines tempera with oil or cut-out collage elements. As he says, it took about one week for one painting of a relatively modest format.
“The windows are without frames and filling, so the views into the landscape are more like pictures within a picture. Light is abstract and constantly diffused. Its source is practically never visible,” says curator Wohlmuth about their content. He exaggerates by saying it’s “old-school painting,” but I mean that in the best way possible. For comparison, our space offers classics such as Pavel Brázda, contemporary artists Hana Puchová or some creators of art brut, who also do not look at rules and trends. As for her prospects, Yamamoto says that her parents are doing well in Japan, so she has no plans to return home just yet. For the local scene, or the audience that attends her exhibition Yum he can see it at the Bold Gallery until January 7th, it’s only good.