Miwa Matsumoto: Linear Paintings and the Dynamic World
Tomohiro Nishimura (art critic)
Miwa Matsumoto has her own unique style of perceiving the world. She exhibits this inner sense instinctively as an artist. Perhaps it is this inner sense that makes Matsumoto draw in the first place. Matsumoto is truthful to her inner artistic sensibilities and therefore she responds in a minimalist way to her inner self. This is what makes her work unique.
Matsumoto's work consists of mono-coloured lines that appear to have been drawn with unimprovised immediacy. There are no colours. Her works can be described as immediate sketch-like interpretations of a subject. I would however suggest that they can be perceived as paintings in their own right, and not be dismissed as just drawings. Matsumoto's work is linear painting.
The subject of her drawings is always what is actually there in front of her. The moment when she approaches her subject is significant for her. The title of the work indicates what Matsumoto was analysing while drawing, but I do not feel that this is something that one must understand since Matsumoto does not draw each object individually. One might ask ‘What then is she drawing?’ She is drawing the entity in front of her, and she uses drawing as a tool to capture these entities.
We generally tend to perceive each individual element as fixed and stationary with concrete contours. This, however, is only when objects are viewed conceptually from the outside. Matsumoto, in contrast, does not see entities conceptually. She does not see all the objects appearing before her individually. Hence she does not divide entities into separate objects, nor does she see motif and background conflicting. This implies that she sees the world's natural evolution through doubting eyes.
We live in a dynamic world. Its shape changes within the blink of an eye and it can never be kept as it is. Matsumoto is aware of and sees such an ever changing world. For her the world with its various connected elements can emerge as a more permanent entity evolving and developing. The perceived world in itself, however, does not emerge alongside with its elements interpreted in outline. In other words, Matsumoto confronts her subjects as they are, before they are conceptually fixed.
Matsumoto often draws subjects that tremble or fade such as trees, rain and light. She is clearly attracted to subjects that continue to change and that do not have permanent shapes. These trembling and fading movements constitute the essence of her work.
Matsumoto’s attitude as an artist can be said to be rather orthodox as she tries to draw objects that appear before her as much in their natural state as possible. Such representations, however, do not turn out as realistic recreations. There is nothing more alien to Matsumoto than, for instance, a homogeneous space created by the geometric perspective representations of western art. The geometric perspective representations exclude any element of time from the canvas in order to realize a realistic three-dimensional illusion. In other words, by giving solid outlines to entities, the world is frozen. In contrast, Matsumoto releases objects from being fixed by outlines, and reconstitutes them into our ever changing world.
Matsumoto uses few lines. Her images portray an economic use of lines. She perhaps believes that there is something precious that will be lost by its being captured in a drawing. It is for this reason that Matsumoto prefers to use only the minimum number of lines to capture the essence.
The world continues to revolve through cycles of change. What Matsumoto tries to capture is each instance of such change. The issue for Matsumoto as an artist is how she can capture the phenomenon that appears before her and the ever changing world in her paintings. By simply copying the outlines of a subject’s shape, however, that subject’s original ability to mutate in many ways is lost. Matsumoto is thus, with lines exhibiting rhythmic and dynamic movement, striving to reanimate the world that is changing before her very eyes.
Matsumoto's lines themselves can be viewed as a game of interplaying lines. She gives "rhythm of life" to the lines. The lines appear to have sketched a part of an outline yet the resonating images are intimately linked to each other and mutually create a sense of harmony in the paintings. That is to say Matsumoto's paintings themselves depict continuous change, and do not simply recreate something that once was there but rather something that exists right at that nascent moment in time. Matsumoto’s images are thus portraying the infinite nature of an endless present. In this way her paintings reveal the diversity of our dynamic visual world.
Matsumoto creates a new meaning of life in our ever-changing world in her two dimensional paintings. By so doing, one can say that she actively acknowledges the world's diversity occurring before her. Thanks to Matsumoto's paintings, we can perceive our world in a new light and consequently re-discover different aspects of its diversity.
May, 2008 |