Eva Sakuma - Paintings Apparent 2.5.-31.5.2016

“Painting and landscape suffuse one another,

a view from the window offers the real picture every day”¹

Eva Sakuma’s paintings feature motifs, symbols and iconographic elements specific to traditional Japanese drawing, but by dint of their distinctive brushwork and unconventional composition emphasising the ornamental makeup of landscape painting they go beyond merely formal depictions of perceived realities. The image is rather a visual shortcut to the real topos as it amalgamates several views into a single imaginary composition based on a personal artistic approach refusing any pictorial cliché. If anything, we face paintings pervaded by a unique atmosphere and charged with genius loci.

Even when a human figure is not present in a painting it cannot be said unequivocally that the human element is ignored as it represents in the painting the artist’s mind reflected precisely in the manner of her artistic expression and in a certain symbolism showing tremendous respect and humility for the natural macrocosmos concomitant with the microcosmos of the human soul. Immensely enthralling is the artist’s exclusive visual association between a view from the house and the landscape. Hemmed-in forms of interior space having a different measure of distance and autonomy in relation to the landscape relate to an order where place and time are tributary indicators.

We move on the boundary of two spaces, Japanese landscape and a concrete interior or its fragment, although Eva Sakuma blurs the borderline between them. It is an amalgam of the two spaces, not their mutual denial. This interconnection creates an illusion of a third space, outwardly dreamlike, though it is in essence far more real than the spaces in which it is born. It is here that a profound contemplative union between a human and a landscape takes place in a given space and time. It is as if space grew from the inside of an image, expanded and penetrated through the entire interior to connect, in the end, with surrounding nature as a symbol of life. The spectator’s view is not locked inside of a block of material and new possibilities of human perception open up before them with a deep understanding of the beauty of the morphology of the reliefs present. All this amplifies the peaceful and mysterious atmosphere of the painting because, like music, it comes into contact with something sacred that touches us deeply.

Eva Sakuma’s visual aesthetic extending to the philosophical plane and spiritual meditation initiates the connection between one’s innermost experience and the external space of a landscape. Dialectic overlapping of perspectives gives rise in the spectator to a certain uncertainty over an illogical combination of different surfaces, natural and artificial, which cannot conjoin in a real world. As expected, the question arises of reality and illusion in art: On the one hand, the pictures emphasise external visible forms perceived solely through the senses; on the other, their inner essence is revealed, subjected to a continual and never ending process of change that cannot be grasped with the eyes. Objective experience of the perception of reality in a given place and time is subordinated here to a subjective vision of reality and the manner of its representation.