Art Articles & Reviews

Mitsu Ikemura, A Pilgrim’s Evocation (Fran Willis Gallery, 1619 Store Street, 381-3422, until May 19). A full preview of this show is available at franwillis.com Mitsu Ikemura was born in Japan and has lived most of his adult life in Canada. Fifteen years ago he left his career as an architect and devoted himself to art. Ikemura’s current show, at the Fran Willis Gallery, is titled A Pilgrim’s Evocation. The artworks are basically collage. Ikemura soaks watercolour paint through many layers of Japanese paper and then tears the resulting coloured sheets into organic shapes. With his training as a designer this is quite natural to him. The papers are layered onto canvas or panels. We talked about art school. “Luckily I never studied at any art school, so I do as I please,” he replied with a smile. Most art practice seems to be about being original and unique - “individuation”. This artist’s path leads to what he calls the spirit. His yoga and meditation are practices which are “the opposite of individuation”, he says. His practice is about bringing things together in an artwork which is unifying. Mitsu Ikemura, Travellers of Eternity 49 x 21 inches, mixed media on panel, 2007 While watching a film of Tibetan singers, a subtitle caught his eye. It read “how does a water droplet become the ocean?”. Ikemura elaborated: “The more we concentrate on the droplet, the more we can never become the ocean,” is how he put it. Eventually an answer appeared to Ikemura - throw yourself into the ocean. Just dive in! This artist is on an endless pilgrimage. “What sort of pilgrim I don’t know. I travel a lot,” he admitted. Regarding travel, a centrepiece of this show his a rattan and paper “burial ship” which hangs from the ceiling, set to sail into The Unknown. To help him sail over the mountains, he has given this ship wings. A moving point of view is the essence of Japanese art and a principle of Ikemura’s graphic practice. He assembles his torn-up bits of paper as if he was arranging flowers. It comes naturally to interpret his assemblages as representing bouquets or sunset skies or even backgrounds to as-yet unwritten stories. But why pin it down to concepts like beauty or love or God or the Muses? Ikemura told me he attempts to waive this “controlling speech” and rediscover the “primordial language” of feeling. “Sensuality - that’s what I am!’” he confided. We both reflected on the thought that immediately after this show he is flying to Tuscany for a tango workshop. His art is an explosive exuberance of colour. “So much modern art goes on from the head up. But this is something tangible.” We were standing in front of his four-part screen, Travellers of Eternity. “It has to have a certain resonance to the environment.” As an architect he understands the utility of his paintings, bright panels which can attune and harmonize the human environment. There is a continuing reference to music in his compositions. So how does one “resonate with the environment”? He spoke of the intangible qualities that can’t be taught - tone in a violin, colour for an artist. “You’ve got to enjoy yourself,” Ikemura insisted. For him it’s not just talk. “I usually paint on a table top and when I do I’m playing around, dancing. I’m jumping up and down, waving my arms about.” The resulting work looks like a gentle storm of petals and goldfish at sunset. For the artist it all comes down to motion. Repeating motion, in fact. “Everything is basically the same molecules which appear in different patterns,” Ikemura underlines. Each pattern which the artist identifies can represent many things. Perhaps that’s what Ikemua meant when he wrote this: “With the language of colour, the grammar of form, creating an inner landscape, a mind-scape, an omnipresent raga of countless voices echoing this timeless light.” “It’s all fractal,” he mused. “My own universal.” While he may not entirely avoid creating illusions of space or place, Ikemura’s paintings successfully avoid subject matter. “In the West everything can - and must - be explained,” he informed me. “Words take the place of the spirit. There is something missing, the resonating connection between head and heart.” Ikemura’s artistic mission is to reestablish the connection of head and heart and to infuse his art with spirit.