The Colors Movement journey
About my recent works 2024
The story of the creation of the world in Genesis has always been a source of inspiration for me. In no way do I intend to stray from the colors I would have previously felt and contemplated in nature. Colors expand and contract in an incessant movement, just like the universe, and my creations stem from the flow of these colors.
And now, the many colors deposited in my memory overflow into my free brushstrokes. When I'm creating a large canvas, I'm in total communion with the colors, and I'd stay there indefinitely if I could.
In 2024, the brushes I hold continue the journey of the “Colors Movement.” I feel a light breeze coming from nowhere in the evening. Clearly, Adam and Eve have hidden in the bushes.
Copying at the Louvre
I studied in France when I was young and I've been painting for 45 years this year.
At the age of 20, I arrived in Paris for the first time in my life, and experienced the unimaginable depth and breadth of art at the Louvre. While I was touched by the cathedrals that dominate the ancient capital, I was disconcerted by the fact that I was being transformed day by day. I decided to start copying works at the Louvre to learn more about Western painting. I learned that I could spend three months copying a painting.
So I devoted every day to working in this museum.
Drawing and Me
I was enrolled in a drawing workshop at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris (School of Fine Arts), and I had never spent so many days thinking about drawing.
In my mind, the point of contact between the East and the West was drawing. I feel that the word '写生, ‘shasei’ in Japanese, implies a subjective act of highlighting beauty, and that the word 'drawing' has a sense of scientific objectivity that has existed since the Renaissance.
Through drawing, I've learned that the vision, inspiration and deeply spiritual creation that go into a painting can only come from what I feel with my hands and my body.
Early paintings
My figurative paintings were influenced by Impressionism and Surrealism.
At the time, I thought that figurative painting should have a mysterious place. The art critic Takeshi Kanazawa commented on my paintings as follows: « One thing comes to mind when I see Takahashi's work. When asked what art is, the famous art critic Otsuro Sakazaki once replied: "Art is the figuration of poetic ideas."
It is extremely difficult to describe the characteristics of art in a few words, but this answer seemed logical to me. One of the attractions of Takahashi's work is the contrast between reality and unreality, which fascinates even French art dealers. »
The path to abstract painting
When I first thought about abstract painting, I set up my easel in the open air, just like many Impressionist painters who painted outdoors, and not just in search of colors.
In the early morning, the blue-purple haze of smoke in the woods gave me a sense of mystery. In the late afternoon, I was captivated by the grape-colored shadow created by the wheat-colored sunlight falling on an old church.
I was moved by the festival of colors at the end of the day, the twilight quietly changing from coral to blue-violet as the curtains of night fell. As I continued to contemplate the changing seasons, I had the feeling that the value of a painting depends on its colors.
First works of abstract painting
In doing so many drawings in the fields, at the riverside, in gardens and in forests, I came to treasure the dialog between nature and my heart. And just as Vermeer, in his work, stopped the flow of time and enclosed nature and human activities in eternity, I wanted to express this through the combination of colors in my abstract paintings.
« Takahashi attempts to express the "mystical silence" that he once saw in the paintings of da Vinci and Vermeer, in colorful abstract paintings that can be seen as stylistically opposed. "His abstract worlds, which could be described as ‘paintings of color’, are born of the accumulation of meticulous ‘drawings’, and constitute the ‘spirituality of painting’ that the artist has never ceased to pursue. The depth created by the colors themselves, and the order created by the relationship between the colored surfaces that align, transcend the Japanese and Western worlds to construct a spiritual space. »
