Kenjiro Okazaki: Et egredietur virga de radice Iesse, et flos de radice eius ascendet. And for all this, nature is never spent. Generations have trod, have trod, have trod. I got old. Landscape plotted and pieced — Off side of my thought? fold, fallow, and plough.
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow. The world is charged with the grandeur of God. Whatever is fickle, freckled — And still — it blooms. who knows how? The light is calm. We were struck by the sudden appearance of yucca trees.
The blossoms are not. Ring-a-ring o’ roses, come again another day. Praise him. The blossoms that remain are falling blossoms. That day, sunset seeing a butterfly fall. Nothing is so beautiful as Spring — when weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush.
That isn’t the longest title in Kenjiro Okazaki’s show at Pace – which remains a powerful London presence, for all its well-publicised scaling back. Okazaki is an architect and theorist as well as an artist who covers robotics, costumes and set design along with his sculpture and painting. This work’s thick swathes of acrylic gel generate a sense of nature’s fecundity, picked up the title’s quotes from Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ‘Pied Beauty’. But what’s the process and the thinking beyond that?
The first point to note is that there are three panels here, each produced separately over a day, but quite likely with months elapsing between them. That relates to Okazaki’s interest in the perception and reconstruction of time. Second, a closer look reveals that aspects of form and colour echo across the panels. Those brushstrokes are not as arbitrary as they initially appear. Third, the marks tend not to overlap: ‘the gaps between brushstrokes emphasise that their proximity is contingent and open’, says the gallery. Like time.
Then one can attempt to relate the marks to that effusive title. Are there blossoms here? Might the three towers of would-be-petal-strokes suggest multi-coloured versions of the normally white spindles of a yucca’s flowering? Trees certainly seem central, as the King James bible renders that Latin opening of the title (from Isiah 11:1) as ‘And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots’– referring to a depiction of the ancestors of Christ as a branching tree which rises from Jesse of Bethlehem, father of King David. That suggests a long historical line, contradicting, perhaps, Hopkins’s conclusion that God fathers-forth a beauty that is ‘past change’.
So: what I like here is that we can enjoy Okazaki’s colourfully distinctive abstract language as a thing in itself, yet also get drawn in speculatively to what he terms the ‘network structure’ of possible meanings that might be read into them…
Paul Carey-Kent selects a ‘Gallery of the Month’, a ‘Show of the Month’, a ‘Work of the Month’ and a ‘Book of the Month’ for his weekly column in FAD.
A collection of previous gallery columns, ‘Paul’s Galleries To Go’, is available from FAD Bazaar.
