Shigeno
Ichimura
On
view at Tower 29 through July 2003
and by appointment at
M.Y. Art Prospects
547 West 27th Street
New York NY 10001
By MAUREEN
MULLARKEY
Sigeno Ichimura
Haze (details to follow)
BORN IN OKINAWA AND RAISED
IN TOKYO, Shigeno Ichimura has lived and worked in New York since 1989.
His small, delicate abstract canvases opened M.Y. Art Prospects' inaugural
show in its new space in Chelsea. Over-sized variants of the same work
hung simultaneously in the lobby of Tower 49, a corporate high-rise
spanning the block from 48th to 49th Street off Madison.
How very different the work
looks in the two places! M.Y. Art Prospects, typical of many in Chelsea,
is a room-sized gallery, not a monumental corporate sanctum. The space
is suited to the intimate size of Ichimura's smaller canvases. Scaled
down canvases stay true to the character of the sensibility on display.
By contrast, Tower 49 is a hollow corridor bereft of everything but
height. Here, the work huffs and puffs to assert itself, contradicting
the calm that makes it so appealing in miniature.
Ichimura's series, entitled
"Moment," offers an art in which nothing happens. It does
not have to. The moment-seen, seized and entered-is enough. Fragile
washes of iron oxide breathe over one another. No brush work is visible.
There are only subtle shifts of liquid movement, as of mists rising
and descending. Surfaces seem stirred by air. There is no imagery to
speak of. We see into a void, silent and still. For those with the temperament
for it, his painting suggests the Buddhist Emptiness, a void of inexhaustible
contents. Placid and nearly monochrome, it prompts reflection, a response
that is only possible at close viewing in a conducive setting.
My companion at the gallery
resisted: "It just looks like a slice of rusted metal." Yes
and no. Ichimura captures the appearance of rust with veils of red-brown
pigment, flecked with black or tinged with siennas that range from orange
to gold. Separated from any recognizable object, the associations we
have with oxidation-dissolution and its escort, mortality-give way to
something else. Suggestions of renovation emerge. Disintegration, testimony
to impermanence, is part of the unending process of becoming. Corrosion
touches and transforms all things of earth. William Blake would have
had no difficulty seeing the world in each particle of rust.
At Tower 49, the prerogatives
of a corporate hall overwhelm the delicacy of Ichimura's touch. Grace
is lost. What is left on these over-sized canvases, made to order for
the space, are the pretensions of Abstract Expressionism with none of
its vigor. The strain of maintaining a gossamer touch over so much acreage
begins to show. Things look less like calls to meditation and more like
. . well, mixed media. Nine paintings, swollen to 8 feet and hung high
overhead, are as compelling as acoustic panels. And as unbeheld. Three
thousand people a day shuttle through this space without looking up.
Only if the elevators are stalled can they take Ichimura's suggestion
to "stop and contemplate for a moment."
Sigeno Ichimura
Passion (details to follow)
Contemplate what? A secular
age drains contemplation of its life's blood. The de-sacralizing of
meditation in contemporary culture turns work like Ichimura's into a
soothing backdrop to something else, hygienic and decorative. Divorced
from its spiritual and religious ends- contemplation-like yoga and sand-painting-
it is enlisted to serve utilitarian intentions. Staying young, losing
weight and relieving stress are among the profane benefits of a state
of prayer. In the arts, the theatre of one's own "creativity"
cancels any plunge into the ego-denying emptiness of Absolute Tao.
This leaves Ichimura, an
ambitious modern, in confusion over the purposes of the action he invites
us to perform. "One of the central themes of my projects is the
process of giving physical existence to my work. I am interested in
letting my artwork exist as physical material along with its surface
image." And what might his work be, distinct from its physical
existence? This is boiled rice pudding, cooked to feed the notion that
an artist's concept takes precedent over the work of his hands. Floating
in the mush is the essential conceit of conceptual art: maybe you'll
get something to look at; maybe you won't. What of it? After all that
cranking and winding in the studio, the only thing that counts is the
artist's own mental event.
Scrapping artists' statements
is usually a sensible move. It would be good if Ichimura ignored his
own and took to the Zen and Shin masters or John of the Cross. Through
them, he might gain a deeper regard for the quiescence at the heart
of his own painting.
