Year: 2023
Medium: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 227.3 x 181.8 cm (89 1/2 x 71 1/2 in.)
Acquired from Taka Ishii Gallery, 2023
The majority of the canvas is based on an indescribable deep red. The viewer loses track of their focus, and the wide canvas appears even wider. The gaze is naturally led towards the center where something appears to be slit horizontally. Yamada often first places a bright yellow color in his works. The brightest color within this piece is also the yellow painted at the fissure. The black line and the colors of the fissure suddenly produce a space within the boundlessness. Willem de Kooning, who has been described in the past as an artist who embodies Abstract Expressionism, never let go of figurativeness throughout his career. The viewer is reminded of de Kooning’s lines when taking in the black lines of Yamada’s work. The two artists’ lines are similar in that they are in tension with the surface rather than dividing the figure and the ground. Although it has been ridiculed as “homeless representation,” if de Kooning’s work has figurativeness which he has freed from a sense of illusion by embedding the layers of line and surface on the same plane coexisting with an abstract sensibility, a significant structural difference lies in how Yamada’s work has been created with an antagonism between the two, which forms many layers on the same plane. Just as one sees an image shown at the forefront as a result of combining multiple layers in CG, Yamada’s painting contains a premise that countless hidden layers exist beneath the surface level, and the viewer anticipates that through the fissure. This is where the space (negative space) exists as a painting. This irreducible multiplicity differs from a palimpsest-like multilayering or the traces of erasure and overwriting. The fact that multiplicity is becoming a self-evident new illusion in today’s world, where painting over something does not equal its erasure, contextualizes the spatiality of this new form of abstract painting.
