Kim Uchiyama Introduced by Karen Wilkin Kim Uchiyama makes austere, elegant paintings that explore the expressive possibilities of order, geometry, and associative hues. Her recent work is also about her experience of ancient architecture and the Mediterranean world, especially Sicily, where she has spent extended time. This is not to suggest her paintings are disguised landscapes. Far from it. They are instead poetic reinventions of her sense of place in the language of paint. Uchiyama has assimilated the brilliant light, transparent water, and varied terrain of the island, including its wide range of vegetation, from lush greens to parched browns. She has looked hard at its ruins and classical temples and internalized their proportions so thoroughly they seem to inform all her paintings. She distills her awareness of the world around her into broad bands of color, often stacked vertically at intervals, like diagrams of remembered encounters. More recently, the color bands are interlocked in vertical and horizontal structures that recall the foundations of ancient cities, their once orderly plans revealed by archeological excavation. Although her paintings are resolutely abstract, built out of pure, but intuitive, geometric relationships, Uchiyama’s titles hint at the stimuli she responds to, encouraging their association. I suspect, however, these connections are underscored after the fact. Recent titles that allude to ancient architecture and sometimes mythology almost certainly have nothing to do with preconception but, instead, derive from Uchiyama’s recognizing something in a finished work that suggested a reference. Uchiyama often plays on the way we involuntarily interpret earth colors, greens, and blues, however minimally presented, as metaphors for land, vegetation, sea, and sky. She composes variations on sequences of nuanced ochers, ultramarines, ceruleans, olives, and other resonant, impure hues, and deploys them in unexpected relationships. By changing the order of a stack of broad color bands, she changes the associations she provokes in her viewers. A glowing tawny band stretching below, with a luminous pale blue levitating toward the top, for example, can together trigger associations with the bleached fields and white-hot sky of a Sicilian summer without looking like anything but controlled, expanses of pigment. Similarly, a band of saturated blue in the lower part of another canvas can evoke memories of the sea, with an earthy stretch above reminding us of distant hills. Yet [End Page 99] no matter how potent these rarified allusions to the natural world may be, the clean-edged structure and harmonious proportions of Uchiyama’s compositions return us to the man-made, the ideal, the Platonic. The more complex geometry of some recent works intensifies these connections. In Uchiyama’s recent works, color and touch have broken loose. Unnamable greens are loosely brushed over elusive mauves. The fleeting suggestions of landscape still make themselves felt, but there is a heightened declaration of the painter’s will and presence that enhances the image. We are encouraged to think not only about allusion, however oblique, but also about the making of the painting. All of this is achieved through minimal means. Taking her cue from Piet Mondrian and the most rigorous of the Constructivist painters, Uchiyama insists on the expressive potential of the horizontal and the vertical, restating the givens of her rectangular canvases and convincing us of the truth of “less is more.” And then she seduces us with color. There’s a lot to look at and think about in Uchiyama’s seemingly stripped-down abstractions. [End Page 100] Click for larger view View full resolution Megaron 1 (2022) by Kim Uchiyama, oil on linen, 30 x 40 inches [End Page 101] Click for larger view View full resolution Megaron 2 (2022) by Kim Uchiyama, oil on linen, 72 x 72 inches [End Page 102] Click for larger view View full resolution Megaron 3 (2022) by Kim Uchiyama, oil on canvas, 66 x 72 inches [End Page 103] Click for larger view View full resolution Odyssey (2020) by Kim Uchiyama, oil on linen, 72 x 66 inches [End Page 104] Click for larger view View full resolution Meridian (2021) by Kim Uchiyama, oil on linen, 72 x 72 inches [End Page 105] Click for larger view View full resolution Cella (2022) by Kim Uchiyama...
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Aug 26, 2024
Peng Zhao + 3
Open Access