TOKYO.- MAKI Gallery presents Emanating Traces, a group exhibition featuring works by Yasuko Hirano, Anne Kagioka Rigoulet, and Kano Kamegawa.
Devoid of specific motifs, the works of these three artists foreground painting’s essential elements such as form, composition, and colour. They refuse to be fixed by any single interpretation and instead allow unexpected images to emerge. Guided by chance, each artist brings spatial depth to the picture plane through her own unique methods, creating practices that transcend rationality and logic to engage deeper with our memories and senses.
The landscapes Yasuko Hirano paints are landscapes in name only, bearing no resemblance to actual scenery. Believing that painting’s inherent flatness cannot truly depict expansive space, Hirano embraces this limitation as a source of possibility. Rather than reproducing tangible objects, she seeks to capture the intangible—subtle fluctuations and elusive presences—within the canvas, developing her distinct pattern in the process.
This pattern involves applying a unique ground made of animal glue and plaster, then repeatedly layering the three primary colours, yellow, red, and blue, over it. The blending and overlapping of pigments produce a grayscale landscape-like form from which memory and sensation are emitted. Of this repetitive act, Hirano writes:
As the act of painting progresses, a sensation of turning inward and shifting toward a new dimension arises. Memories and landscapes come to me as though time were moving backward, expanding toward possibilities that ‘might have been.’
In this way, the work acquires depth beyond its physical flatness, revealing to the viewer a presence unbound by words or concrete imagery. This is not a mere reproduction of memories; through her pattern, Hirano uncovers variations and fluctuations within time that may at first seem uniform, drawing out the images that dwell there. Looking at the images that appear becomes, simultaneously, an act of being looked back at—across time, beyond reason, from past or future. At the moment she feels herself ‘met by the gaze’ of the painting, Hirano marks the surface with dots or lines, giving weight to the elusive qualities that the work draws forth.
The works of Anne Kagioka Rigoulet, which take the water’s surface as a motif, likewise do not depict any actual body of water. Interested in what lies beneath or behind the visible world, Kagioka captures and renders the instant when the figurative is abstracted in the rippling surface. What emerges is not narrative born from representation, but the energies that shape nature and the movements and forces that arise in the process of abstraction.
This exhibition presents drawings from her Figure series, created as part of this ongoing exploration. Familiar human forms intersect and merge with each other or with landscapes, continually transforming and generating a dynamic sense of motion and immediacy in the process of abstraction. In particular, her Pair series that began this year, limits each composition to two figures in order to explore relationships of form and open pathways to diverse interpretations and imaginative possibilities.
In her previous paintings, Kagioka has pursued surface volume, texture, and colour through a combination of graffito (a traditional fresco technique) and fabric collage. Here, however, she employs the flat support of drawing, restraining both palette and saturation while vividly capturing layered transformations.
Kano Kamegawa employs materials from traditional Japanese painting to depict fragments of words and letters, seeking to reconstruct the relationship between language and painting. She has long felt unease with the act of assigning words, whether as titles or conceptual statements, to artworks. This stems from her sensitivity to the dissonance between the images that arise on the surface and the meanings imposed by language, as well as to the suggestive power of words that can alter the viewer’s perception of an image.
To overcome this feeling, Kamegawa has turned, paradoxically, to making words (letters) themselves the subject of her paintings. Confronted with a surface covered in familiar hiragana, the viewer instinctively tries to read them. Yet Kamegawa’s works gently deflect this impulse, inviting a dialogue with painting that cannot be accessed through reading alone.
Fully aware of how linguistic systems shape our perception and society, and of the constraints this imposes, Kamegawa subtly resists these existing structures, seeking to allow painting to interfere with language. In doing so, she says, “I feel that within the work, in my own internal dialogue, and in my relationships with others, there is a kind of tolerance that enables the acceptance of differing perspectives.”
The layers of ground (background) and figure (characters), built up through Japanese painting techniques, possess a delicate beauty akin to multiple veils laid atop one another. Utilizing traditional materials such as gofun (powdered shell pigment), her work offers a unique texture and depth that stirs not only the visual sense but others as well, evoking a sense of eternal distance.
Each of these three artists engages with painting from her own distinct perspective and method, seeking to preserve on the surface fleeting sensations, unseen presences, and meanings that lie beyond visual representation. We invite you to encounter these rare and resonant practices in this exhibition.
Written by Haruna Takeda
