Dídac

Yamamoto´s art deeply fascinated me and made me for the first time see that death is of the most penetrating things fathomable to man, whilst also being the common fabric that intertwines all our paths and cultures.

The fleeting impermanence of death is perceived as a symbol of dread and stigma but also power, we are able to appreciate and make use of our time because of the invisible axe which looms over our heads, slowly getting closer as we near our earthly expiry date. It’s an incomprehensible inevitability which interrupts immortality and thus invincibility, an inevitability which is narrated solely through those who have lived… and subsequently disappeared.

Through the spectral vantage point of imagination people have desperately scavenged myradical panoramas of what it means to truly exist, only to vanish and be enveloped by darkness and uncertainty; that is the obfuscation of death. Despite the inescapable collapse of their physical shell, artists continue to contend against time to acquire some elusive abstraction of an answer to these impossible questions. Perhaps it is in this futile struggle that we derive art, the writhing crawl of a maggot to a mirage with which they find their petulant minds overwhelmed with a storm of seemingly allusive ideas. It is these slaves to the perpetual need to justify the existential blip of their carnate form in our reality through aesthetic that I consider artists.

To the harrowing artwork of Yamamoto Takato death is a central thematic, it symbolically portrays the cycles of growth and decay, the genesis of life and the dismantlement of the body and mind.

In this piece named st Sebastian Yamamoto invokes Christian imagery as he welcomes us to the underworld with a woman adorned in death and decay slumped against a horrifying mass of debris opposite an angelic man pierced by arrows.

Contrasting common practise in contemporary art, Yamamoto’s poses are always serene, death is never presented through frenetic violence or trick-stream gore but rather, through an afterthought: death is always imminent. Another chapter, and a fragment of what it means to be human, and so his artwork is extremely refined and his aesthetic is often a product of fine lines which he contours with organic shapes and patterns.

Yamamoto works with ink and acrylic pigments in both canvas and paper mediums. His delicate line work is often matched by a lightness to his approach to form, his images rarely display a beginning and end, instead they appear fluid and highly ornamental. Yamamoto has discarded the notion of time and chronology refusing to see life as a linear journey which ends at the destination of death but rather intends to portray life and death as highly woven together with each other under the pretext of existence.

Yamamoto’s work is reminiscent of traditional Japanese Ukiyo-e print in conjunction with the quaint lyricism of art nouveau posters and gothic romanticism through decadent thematic, creating images with the power to entrance and haunt. Saturating backgrounds with labyrinthine patterns coupled with religious and historical subjects, this technique recalls a reverence for a faraway beauty. That being said, Yamamoto is thoroughly situated within his own times: Yamamoto’s figures emanate a Japanese pop-cultural context with the more refined structures of modern manga. These manifold mutations of beauty and history relay Yamamoto’s transfigurative impulses.

Occurring at the same time as Art Nouveau, the Decadent Movement applied Aestheticism to a greater pallet of dark provocation. In a more glaring reflection of Fin de siècle-era social unrest, the Decadents uprooted conservative moral codes through visual debauchery and general misbehaviour. With this came the ideal of sensual polarity, often in the mingling of death and sexuality. Ideas which Yamamoto melds with sinuous brush strokes and minimal colour usage evolving these elements of erotic and grotesque art into a mysterious eros unique to him, labelled heisei estheticism.

Yamamoto Takato manipulates the human form to portray many of his figures as mutilated, an eruption of organic material and tissue. Decadence is paired with nuance of form; saturated backgrounds are paired with intricate patterns. Religious and historical imagery is paired with sombre undertones, western influences are juxtaposed with Japanese historical keystones. The idea of sensual polarity is prevalently suffused throughout his art.

Death and eroticism walk side by side in his provocative compositions, he aestheticizes morbidity through sublime imagery creating an everlasting dance between delight and repulsion. His manipulation of space within a single composition is also important to notice, Yamamoto’s work seems to be fully realised within itself, he snares his subjects in a hypnotic gaze, an almost cyclical composition. Yamamoto offers the viewer a narcotic stillness at the intersection of lust and the fear of ceasing to exist—the figurative eye of arousal’s storm.

Serenity and death share the same ethos, life seems to be developing and decaying simultaneously, and through Yamamoto’s lens these processes occur harmoniously. Bones merge with carcasses, insects and plants, blood and saliva. Bodies are androgynous, eyes are vindictive and mysterious. There’s no beginning or end in this overgrowth, only a sense that all there is in the world is depicted to us through every image suspended in time.

And because his work is so self-contained, it tells a story in each image. Cadavers, debris and organic shapes invaginate everything, engulfing all the figures so that the borders between bodies and environment are often vague alluding to the idea that soon we will be physically a part of the environment, not just metaphorically. His compositions are narrow and elongated, most of his work reflects a strong verticality, with a lot of dead space and a blend of figurative art and abstraction. Always extremely graphic, his compositions dialogue with our secret, occult fascinations with our own mortality. The artwork itself seems to make a meta-reference to this through the personification of the tree on the left that appears to have an eye, nose, and mouth. Though it has a face, and presumably thoughts of its own, it shows no remorse in its expression for the suffering man across from it. It seems more fascinated with his suffering than anything, suggesting Yamamoto’s intention for viewers to be fascinated with the aesthetic of the violence he portrays in the image without remorse. Moreover, the woman at the base of the personified tree embodies death as she looks down upon the corpse she holds with her head wrapped in faces with closed eyes and a skull. She wears death like she would wear jewels, admiring its beauty. She allows Yamamoto to state that death is not man’s hideous undoing, but that death is a part of the artistic exploration of existence..

His recurring Shinbadi motifs allow for the body to present itself as distorted and manipulated. The stillness of his paintings juxtaposes the violence and metamorphic delocalisation of work, refusing to allow his work to conform to the unbridled, chaotic nature of contemporary artwork. I believe Yamamoto’s colour palette is what cements the quietude of his work, we can see the figures in this piece stand against dark clouds filling a darker sky, telling me that this is not the earth i know, even when highly ornamental his light touch allows for his work to never feel heavy handed, such that his motifs and themes can be conveyed with an immense sense of decorum. And because he is solely preoccupied with aesthetic equilibrium, every element in his work is rendered to perfection. The lingering sense of mortality and tensions between death and existence string Yamamoto’s pieces together. And this delicate treatment runs throughout all the visual code of his work.

His mark-making is precise and uniform. If we reach really close to Yamamoto’s Saint Sebastian we can observe the precision with which each line was drawn. This element of uniformity forges a sense of realism and grants three dimensionality to an otherwise flat composition lacking structural shading in its loyalty to the Ukiyo-e printmaking style. It is this same sense of uniformity in delicate linework that I tried to mirror 2 years ago when starting my art GCSE, I remember being fascinated by the sharp boldness the outlines in his work made as they sliced through a shadowless world, and soon I was obsessed with trying to replicate it.

Yamamoto’s world is of crimson reds and dying flowers. By bringing what’s internal out, opening the body in its living state and making the flesh visible, his paintings function as a mirror of our own limits, the penetrability of our flesh is presented as a symbol of our boundaries as fragile compositions, delicately and meticulously strewn together with no tangible beginning or end other than the one we impose on ourself. Do we live only because it is a certainty that the walls of the great fortress of living cells we consider our body collapses? By choosing to expose what’s fragile inside the human condition; taking the body further from reality, to an absurd post-existence he is reflecting on the fragmentation of the self, our mortality and physical shell through a painted labyrinth that conceals as it reveals.

Yamamoto is not violating the sanctity of death or even the purity of the flesh, but instead he’s reflecting what it means to be alive, to create, to exist and to be.