First and foremost, I'd like to express my deepest gratitude to Raphaëlle and Frédéric, from L'Étrange Galerie, and to all those who have helped bring this exhibition to Herblay-sur-Seine.
To explain my path as a Japanese painter living in France, I need to recount two premonitions I had at an early age.
One of the strongest memories I have of my childhood is of my father leafing through art books on French painting in his spare time. Wouldn’t it be my father's art books, which introduced me to French culture, that provoked my first premonition?
I would have had a second one when I was in high school, preparing with my art teacher for a Japanese art school competition. Although he had taught me perfectly all the skills I needed to succeed in this competition, I didn't feel comfortable with the academic way. I preferred to draw as I pleased, and sometimes I argued with him. One day, jokingly, he said to me: “With a temper like that, you'd do better drawings if you went to France.”
That's why I came to study and work in France, the country of the pictorial rupture represented by Impressionism. Some forty-five years have passed since the day when, after crossing the Eurasian continent on the Trans-Siberian Railway, I entered the City of Light. In Paris, I studied at the School of Fine Arts (Beaux-Arts) for six years. When I started visiting the Louvre assiduously, I felt an immense nostalgia, as if I were walking through my father's art books.
Due to the light I perceived during my successive premonitions, I became very sensitive to colors. If I often have visions of colorful fragments, it's perhaps because sixty years ago, I read my father's Impressionist art books and was seized by the beauty of their colors. For me, the theme of a painting is certainly important, but the color composition is even more so. Sometimes I'll even leaf through a catalog upside-down or, when I'm painting a canvas, study it from all angles.
At this stage of my pictorial work, I'm convinced that the language of colors and their movements represents the very essence of a painting. The colors I've tried to gather from my field sketches give rhythm to the movement of my brushes.
I've named this journey, which I'm still pursuing, “The Movement of Colors ”.
What I want to paint is the light breeze that crosses Jean-Antoine Watteau's painting Le Pèlerinage à l'île de Cythère, or the violent wind that blows across the Champ de blé aux corbeaux by Van Gogh.
Today, I see an ancient image, that of the Ethiopian eunuch joyfully continuing his journey in a perfect light blending many vivid colors, and in winds of peace, those that carried Philip on the road to Gaza.
It's as if the winds my mind strives to paint continue to leaf through the beautiful books my father left me.
Kazuaki TAKAHASHI
English translation by Suzanne Bloise.
