"Yamaguchi’s highly theatrical images allow viewers to see all – from top to bottom – as if gazing from the vantage point of the eye of God.”
The ocean depths meet land and sky in the dreamlike landscape of Takako Yamaguchi’s Untitled, where pink flowers blossom into a gold leaf sunset before a receding horizon of rolling green hills. Towering at nearly seven feet tall, Untitled from 1998 is an exquisite paragon of Yamaguchi’s painterly ethos, which she has developed over the past three decades to renew landscape painting with a mesmerizing hybridity of Western art historical tradition and East Asian aesthetics. Born in Okinawa, Japan, Yamaguchi has lived and worked in Los Angeles since 1978 and finds herself at the center of attention today, having been prominently featured in the 2024 Whitney Museum Biennial to critical acclaim. A recent highlight of Yamaguchi’s first solo exhibition at STARS Gallery, Los Angeles in 2021, Untitled was also included in the artist’s solo presentation at the pioneering Los Angeles Jan Baum Gallery in 1999, one year after it was produced. Employing cosmological flair upon its metal leaf and paper surface, Untitled is exemplary of Yamaguchi’s ability to present the universal glory of nature through a seamless marriage of divergent aesthetic traditions.
Opulent, idyllic, and near divine, Untitled unravels with a transcendental reverie of abstracted natural forms. Coral reefs abound along the aquamarine base of the composition, alongside feathery sea anemones that sway happily underwater. Velvety pink flowers stretch into the stratospheric heights of golden skies as their petals drift along a soft breeze throughout the composition. The colors of this abstract landscape blend in luscious gradations, animating the subtle yet intensely crisp, graphic details while evoking the full splendor of nature. Subsuming the viewer into its monumental yet delicate verticality, Untitled invited one to peer into this phantasmic wonderland with cosmic-like oversight: as art historian Gianna Carotenuto notes, “Composed to evoke an omniscient perspective – a pictorial device often featured in Renaissance and Asian landscape painting – Yamaguchi’s highly theatrical images allow viewers to see all – from top to bottom – as if gazing from the vantage point of the eye of God.” (Gianna Carotenuto, "Takako Yamaguchi," Art Issues, No. 61, January - February 2000, p. 56)
Devoted to reviving aesthetic histories overlooked by the predominance of Modernism, Yamaguchi aligned her practice with the American Pattern and Decoration movement in the 1970s, which sought to collapse the divisional hierarchies between art and craft; Eastern and Western aesthetics; “high” and “low” art. Untitled sees Yamaguchi delicately disrupting the Western tradition of landscape painting by converging visual elements sourced from the iconography of her native Japan: here, the resplendence of deep ultramarines and shimmering golds recalls the palette of Byzantine icons, while painterly arches, geometric patterns, and ornate flourishes elegantly swirl throughout the composition, mirroring the decorative designs seen in Japanese textiles and screens. Formed by the overlapping edges of metal leaf squares, the grid composition in Untitled is as reminiscent of Japanese folding screens as it is of the backgrounds of medieval religious mosaics. “Using a distinctive repertoire of recurring shapes and patterns, each of Yamaguchi’s alluring pictures is a microcosm of the natural world,” continues Gianna Carotenuto. “Abundant with undulating forms, vibrant lines, dizzying scale shifts, and luscious color palettes, her glorious paintings echo nineteenth-century Japonisme, the gilded glamour of Gustav Klimt, and the gaudy dazzle of French deco” (Ibid.)
Mediating the diverse lineages of Western and Eastern art in perfect harmony, Yamaguchi’s Untitled presents a paradisiacal vision of nature that is truly otherworldly. Here, the planetary realms of land, sea, and sky collapse into a heavenly unison that delights in natural wonder and testifies to the dazzling apotheosis of Yamaguchi’s practice. Upon the panoramic pictorial surface of Untitled, Yamaguchi’s graphic abstraction opens a mystical dimension that suspends the sublime beauty of nature in romantic stillness. “The viewer is allowed to float within Yamaguchi’s optical suspensions, which deftly play with the flatness of the canvas and the illusory depths of the picture,” writes Evan Lincoln on the occasion of Yamaguchi’s 2023 solo exhibition at Ortuzar Projects, New York. “In this way, the greatest delight of Yamaguchi’s art rests in its delicate balances: of two and three dimensions, of the absurd and the everyday, of deep serenity and endless surprise.” (Evan Lincoln, “Critics’ Picks: Takako Yamaguchi,” Artforum, May 2023 (online))
