KEN YABUNO: EUROPA RE-REMEMBERED

Everything Appears If You Stand Still (2005)

The Fascist dictator Generalissimo Francisco Franco may not have been everybody's cup of tea, but he did manage the unusual feat of transcending time. His restoration of the old aristocracy and the Catholic Church in Spain effectively turned the clock back, while his restrictive economic policies helped preserve Spain as it has always appeared in the imagination, as a timeless land of beautifully-aged buildings and clear brilliant skies.

This particular Spain also made a strong impression on the artist Ken Yabuno, when he arrived there in 1970, hoping to study architecture and ended up studying art instead. His oil paintings – 52 of which have been collected for an impressive retrospective at the Fuchu Art Museum – create a world that resolutely stands aside from conventions of time by embracing memory and reminders of the past, while expressing a sense of the present and future.

"When I stayed in Spain, I wanted to go to the scenery that existed before the Spanish Civil War," the artist told the Japan Times in a recent interview. "I visited the town of Belchite that was destroyed in a civil war battle. The damage was very great, so a new town was built in another place, while the ruins are preserved to keep the memory. Living people, dead people, people who will be born in the future, the things I want to paint are beyond time and space."

Born in 1943, Yabuno is old enough to remember the wartime destruction of his own native city Nagoya. He now lives and works in Tokyo, a city that has also seen more than its fair share of destruction and rebuilding.

"When I was small, I saw the bombed out cities," he remembered. "That’s how I got interested in architecture. When I started painting I wanted to see old houses. When I returned to Japan, I was very aware of the difference between old and new buildings. At that time the main streets had a lot of new buildings, but behind them there were lots of old houses. Tokyo was built in 1603, but since then it has been rebuilt fifty times. This is quite different even from a new country like the USA, where places like Boston and Harvard still have buildings from the 17th century."

Although his paintings, invariably focus on Europe and the Mediterranean, the 51 pastel and watercolor sketches also included in the exhibition, frequently show Japanese scenes and buildings, including Waseda University where he also teaches. One of these, entitled Around Tokyo Station in Near Future, showing the old station building dwarfed by an encroaching gang of skyscrapers, leaves you in no doubt where he stands on the city's constant redevelopment. But what exactly is this fascination with buildings of a certain age?

"In old buildings you can see the daily life of people from generation to generation," he explained. "After about fifty or sixty years, buildings reflect the character of the people. It's similar to the lifetime of people."

But while Yabuno paints scenes that may seem culled from the tourist brochures of Europe, these are not over-reverential romanticizations of cherished locations. The way in which he processes his images gives his paintings a cutting edge and a contemporary relevance.

"Memory is fragmental," he explained. "In my paintings I combine the fragments of memory like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. I sketch from many different locations and then compose the different elements. In some of my paintings the architecture you see doesn’t actually exist."

Giorgio, I Can Hear Your Voice (1989)

This often creates offbeat assemblages of architecture and misaligned shadows that recall the works of the proto-Surrealist painted Giorgio de Chirico. When he paints buildings and scenes that do exist, he sets them in the context that his memory suggests. An excellent example is Everything Appears If You Stand Still (2005), a soaring view of the bay of Naples.

"You can’t see this scene from that point," he said. "The viewpoint is unreal but I wanted to see everything from this level, from above."

An important feature of this work is Mount Vesuvius, shown erupting in the distance, as well as in the painting within the painting. This refers to the way a past eruption by the volcano destroyed yet also preserved the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and in a sense made them timeless.

"When I went to the Roman cities I wanted to dig and open them up," he recalled. “I had a similar feeling when I painted this."

Although this painting has the plume of an eruption, a characteristic of most of Yabuno's works is the cloudless, azure sky, devoid of all detail.

"With the blue of the sky I am trying to express a sense of eternity and infinity," he explained.

But while he strives towards timelessness in his paintings, he also introduces elements of specificity, painting human figures in period costume and specific makes of cars.

"This is a 1930 Ford," he says pointing to a classic car in another of his paintings. "And over here this here is '54 Oldsmobile."

The tension between the finite and the infinite, the moment and eternity, give these paintings a profound beauty. If that's not enough there's plenty to interest the student of architecture or the classic car enthusiast.

C.B.Liddell
The Japan Times
30th August, 2007