“The Figure wanted to emerge, but the Landscape would not allow this to happen. Trapped in the air of becoming, in a way suffocated by the surrounding foliage-sludge in which it found itself ensconced.”
Aptly, the exhibition catalogue text accompanying a suite of paintings by Maki Na Kamura (born Osaka, Japan) takes the form of an ekphrastic poem, a composition that conjures up the elusive nature of the artist’s images, with their almost-but-not-quite recognisable elements of landscapes and figures. Quicksand-like, these intimations ultimately evade the viewer’s grasping eye and mind. Kamura’s figures “crave emergence” but are never allowed definition or autonomy within her suggestive fields of colour that tenuously infer the presence of human figures, water, skies, trees and fleeting horizon lines. For all this pictorial mystification, she designates many of her works as landscapes in a sui generis system of titles, with a longstanding series bearing the initials LD, for Landschaftsdarstellung, landscape representation.
At times, specific art historical references have been identified in Kamura’s work: Giorgione, Nicolas Poussin, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and Jean-Francois Millet – and she describes herself as both a contemporary and traditional painter – but it is preferable to take in these paintings on their own terms and submit to their slightly destabilising, alluring presence, with viewers, as Kamura suggests, free to project their own associations.