The title of Yu Kiwanami's "Confirmation of Happiness" (2013) is, in a sense, a kind of betrayal; for happiness cannot, in fact, be confirmed. A woman stands before a landscape, her head cropped off by the top edge of the picture in an artistic act of decapitation. With no head, we cannot see if she smiles or not, and the body language is oblique. The landscape, dark and craggy with low horizon and an expansive empty sky, speaks more to a bleak and near-sinister psychology.
Kiwanami invariably trims the heads off his figures, mostly women, though there are two other portraits of men in the exhibition that are treated similarly. His models are based on those found in fashion magazines, usually smartly dressed. But even when heads are depicted, their faces are always obscured. Lacking identity, the personalities of the figures fall as flat as their two-dimensional treatment — graphic delineation in black lines, and bodies that forgo volumetric modulation. The figural attention is to body surfaces and attire.
A fundamental shift in Kiwanami's most recent painting is to fuse this two-dimensional graphic style he has pursued almost exclusively until 2012 with a newfound interest in French Impressionism. The fusion is incremental.
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.