Bellas Artes Gallery

The view from Mount Pisgah: Reflecting on the Guggenheim's ambitious 1996 retrospective of abstract art ("Abstraction in the Twentieth Century: Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline"), critic Calvin Tomkins wrote that "abstraction did not lead to the promised land of new truths and new freedoms" that lay beyond the limits of representation. Tomkins went on to note that two great precursors of abstraction--Matisse and Picasso-- were content to view that promised land from a lofty distance, eschewing pure abstraction in their own work (a point underscored by the major "Matisse Picasso" show that opened last May at London's Tate). In a review of the same show, Robert Hughes observed that "none of the more exalted claims made of abstract art over the past century have worn well" -- neither the new spiritual orders of Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian at the start, nor, at its apogee, the Abstract Expressionists' "oracular guff about existential confrontation...."

For all that, abstract art was indeed "the defining style of the twentieth century" (Tomkins), and both critics seem to ascribe that achievement to two factors. First, abstract artists produced some of the most beautiful and dramatic visual encounters of the century. Second, in the very act of breaching the bounds of representation, abstraction vastly broadened the scope of artistic activity by redefining the boundary itself as "the border between what's abstract and what isn't..." where "so much of the most interesting art of the 20th century exists (Hughes)." Perhaps that is what the Guggenheim show's curator, Mark Rosenthal, meant in his catalogue essay when he proffered "something else" as the elusive element that abstract art must possess if it is to succeed.

The seven abstract paintings of Makoto Fujimura on view last month at Bellas Artes have that "something else." Fujimura builds horizontal, monochromatic fields of intense atmospheric blue or red through layered applications of native-ore pigments suspended in an animal-hide glue medium. The crystalline particles of azurite and cinnabar refract through the brushed layers of paint to imbue the surface with the lustrous sheen and intimations of alternately fluid or marble-like depths. In several works the artist animates the color field with a central gestural form drawn by repeated calligraphic brushstrokes, evoking the cryptic narrative of an ink painting or a classical landscape scroll. Fujimura's description of his work aptly captures the visual effect: "As the light becomes trapped within pigments, a 'grace arena' is created, as the light is broken, and trapped in refraction. yet my gestures are limited, contained, and gravity pulls the pigments like a kind friend."

The relatively moderate scale of the paintings resists the epic gesture and monumentality attained by Abstract Expressionist precedents. Yet it does assure the fragile tension of grace and gravity that elevates Fujimura's art to a poetic dimension beyond the direct visual appeal of pure abstraction.

Richard Tobin
THE magazine, September 2002