After a flourishing exhibition itinerary focused on of the most winsome declinations of Japanese Pop Surrealism in the spirit of rainbow, Dorothy Circus Gallery is ready to end its spring in great style, with its last unmissable artist belonging to the neo surrealist Japanese scene. June the 9th will host Fuco Ueda’s astonishing first European solo show called “Yumei”- This world and the other world”, a term chosen by the artist to explain a complex philosophy of life perception which emerges from the 13 paintings on show. Those are huge canvases overflown with oriental wisdom and delicate emotions narrated by mysterious characters laying at the bottom of sea landscapes.
Fuco Ueda was born in Japan in 1979 and graduated from Tokyo Arts graduate school. As Yosuke Ueno and Kazuki Takamatsu, she is part of that new surrealism developed in Japan, influenced by Yoshitomo Nara and Kawashima, and by the richest and most personal imaginaries that make this art pure and its artists extremely innovative. Currently Fuco Ueda is part of a group show started in April 22nd lasting until May 21st at the 21st Century Museum of Art in Kanazawa, Japan, and focusing on the unusual theme of goldfish expressed through the most bizarre variations thought by the artist. The extensive use of the most natural materials, including powdered mineral pigments on paper, cloth and wood, together with acrylic paint, deeply reflects the organic quality of her fictions, where the vibrantly colored flora and fauna fill the air floating on lavender skies or growing from the groundless fog. Those of Fuco Ueda can be simply defined as open doors on a boundless limb, where time stops streaming, fixed in an everlasting dawn, and space loses its consistence. In those stop-motion scene complex female figures remain impassive, their gazes lost in painful wander, their light bodies stuck in symbolic postures.
Fuco Ueda’s compositions reveal a sharp sense of sophistication and unperceivable lightness that shapes sceneries made of breeze and dreams’ shreds. Despite its gaudy, “shot” colors that blend into each other to create a photonegative effect, they reveal the same softness and subtle iconography recalling the Japanese prints “Ukyio”. Those were prints dealing with “A floating World”, a reality apart, as happens for Yumei, which narrates about those women’s precarious existence in the remote gardens of the unconscious, where universal truths wait to be whispered to reveal the line dividing the “here” from “there”.
“Here” or “Mei” stands for our lighted world, “There” or “Yu” is the land of the spiritual, the dark afterlife that looks upon us, yet we cannot sense. It is perceivable only through the thin layers of pale blues and purples hiding the painting perspective making things vanish into space. In the middle of the arcane matter, spirited women, their skin touched by gold, their eyes circled in red, frozen into the stillness of a memory, try to communicate with us. They are overthinking upon a vision, an awareness of that “beyond” which is unreachable for us. They are the only mediators allowed to lie on the suitable line of nowhere, where this world and the other almost touch, but everything remains in suspension.
On this boundary, figures can be neither live nor dead, while parts of their bodies turn into bones making them wandering phantoms. This is evident in “Kiss”, where the character tries meticulously to examine a bizarre flower, in search of that lost memory, the secret message concealed.
In “Flames of this and the other World”, the same girl is now revealing a new side of the story. She shows us how fire can become harmless, assuming rosy, bizarre nuances. Those are inner flames of magic knowledge floating in the air, and the figure, who gives them shelter, is their guardian, destined to live in perpetual suspension.
Bizarre shades and abstract nuances distort the natural light in Fuco Ueda’s enchanting places oscillating between the concrete and the invisible, where everything is revealed but will not appear to us in the form we are expecting. Yumei is a final explosion of outlandish colors, a vibrant stream of consciousness that will leave you breathless.
