ON WATER FLAMES

In 2002, months after September 11th, Makoto Fujimura began a series of paintings based on T.H. Eliot's The Four Quartets. The Four Quartets are the metaphorical culmination of Eliot's personal journey that begins in a post-war society (of which Eliot condemns the barrenness, The Wasteland, 1922) only to end in a war stricken world (The Four Quartets, 1943). By the time he wrote the Four Quartets Eliot was deeply inspired and influenced by Dante's "Divine Comedy" in both content and structure. Thus, the author shifted from the absolute spiritual desolation that permeated "The Wasteland" to the quasi certainty that human salvation is possible through hope and personal belief.

Fujimura explains: "The Four Quartets reveal a poet who struggled to understand the darkness of a war-torn world, he consciously became a voice of hope despite the darkness around him. His personal journey was one of being "disastrously married, accidentally expatriated, emotionally dependent..." (Dana Gioia). And yet he reached that place of stillness. I needed to journey with the poet through "The Waste Land" into "The still point of the turning world" in my post 9/11 experience".

The titles of the series mostly elicit from Dante's Divine Comedy. Dante describes an upward journey of a poet, from hell to heaven, yet he declares it a Divine Comedy and not Tragedy trying to convey lightness to a theme that apparently has none. For Fujimura Dante's quandaries become a metaphor of his own struggles in this post 9/11 world. As Dante's personal journey is a political one that engages the violent diatribe between Guelfi (Catholic Church) and Ghibellini (Emperor), Fujimura's Water Flames rest on the artist's preoccupation with contemporary worldly affairs and his efforts to come to terms with events that he has directly experienced (9/11) and others that are part of a not so remote past (Hiroshima and Nagasaki). Thus Dante, Eliot and Fujimura are inextricably linked in their attempt to understand the presentness of the past and the posterity of the present. As artists the three have made a deeply conscious decision to express their preoccupations to the best of their talents.

"Water Flames" results from Fujimura's desire to further explore Eliot's "knot of fire". As the artist himself has pointed out to deal with fire is a fearsome task. "Fire can be illustrated easily, and the abbreviated forms can be found everywhere, e.g. "explosive content". But how is fire's essence to be captured? What is its shape? How do you describe its energy? The depiction of flames is a difficult, if not an impossible, task. The attempt is to capture the essence of something you think you see, but in reality is elusive to capture. Fire is at once recognizable and yet mysteriously abstract at the same time". It is a very powerful source of life while being the most dangerous source of destruction.

As T.S Eliot, Fujimura plays on the interaction between the 4 basic elements: Water, Air, Earth and Fire. The precious minerals he pulverizes are gifts from the earth, which he layers with the aid of water onto Kumohada paper made in Imadate, Japan specifically for this project. The strongest and biggest paper in the world is the result of the combination of Japanese mulberry and hemp fiber. Fujimura has made his own version of it, Fujimura paper, which is more apt to host the paramount of all minerals: gold. Paper breathes, it constantly molds itself to its surroundings and this process is captured by the watermarks on the surface. These freeze the motion while revealing the history of the process of painting. The watermarks allow the eye to stop and take in the surface giving weight to it. At the same time, the prismatic effects one experiences while viewing the works are a consequence of light being held prisoner of the pigment. Gold powder, mixed with Nikawa (Japanese animal hide glue) is the ideal color to be placed on top of Japanese vermillion and cochineal (derived from a tiny insect in India). Japanese vermillion is grinded in a very fine manner that allows for a subtle and elegant light to emerge from the background. While acrylic or oil are mostly flat pigments, Japanese vermillion offers an extraordinary depth and intensity. The surface of the painting is transformed in an ecosystem of colors by combining earth, air, and water with, in this new series, fire. Fire has been forever embedded in the Nihonga technique such an organic one it is. As the moon is the earth's sole satellite, in Nihonga painting water is the only viable vector for fire's depiction.

Very few paintings in modern times depict fire as a source of mystery, rather than a source of destruction or final judgment. There are a few fire images by Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter, Max Ernst, Bill Viola and Rosemary Laing, and yet, flames, play a central role from Egyptian times to Giotto, with ample examples up to medieval times. In Japan, similarly, fire images are very present and alive. This made the subject matter all the more endearing. For Fujimura to paint Water Flames was a liberating inner-struggle. One can certainly perceive a sense of angst alongside a pensive meditation in these works where past and present coalesce. The grander dimensions, the creases in the Kumohada paper, the visible layering and the enveloping lush, sensuous colors bestow a timelessness to the canvases that remain a very contemporary reaction to History's (thus mankind's) decision-making process. Ultimately these monumental yet intimate works, which are lyrically abstract yet visceral, are about faith. What Fujimura wishes is for the work to converse directly with its audience. The paintings strength resides in their plasticity, better yet, tolerance as they can be subjected on the audience's part to a dual interpretation: both temporal and religious depending on the viewer's personal belief system. But the artist does not want to show us la retta via; the right way is for us to decide. Fujimura's paintings allow for skeptics as myself to do the one thing that secularism has labeled as a sign of weakness: to hope.

Sara Tecchia