Hiroka Yamashita at Tanya Leighton

These are landscapes that beguile with extra than simply the visuals. You sense the wind or the burden of the fog. You are feeling the coldness of the falling snow in your pores and skin or the heat of the hearth. The works of Hiroka Yamashita search to seize what, strictly talking, eludes the attention: the impermanence and inconstancy of nature and the myriad nuances of humankind’s attachment to it. The title of this exhibition, “Fūdo,” is a Japanese phrase meaning “wind” or “earth” and might check with the local weather but in addition applies to cultural traditions, together with medieval royal authorized codes. Extra pointedly, it’s a citation of the title of a 1935 e-book wherein the Japanese thinker Tetsuro Watsuji probes the manifold ties that bind people to the pure world and the affect the setting can have on one’s character.

Executed in oil on canvas, Yamashita’s work scrutinize this relationship with unmatched sensitivity and tenderness, incorporating components from each conventional Japanese portray and Western artwork. Willow and Figures round a Fireplace, 2021, provides a lyrical instance, foregrounding a foggy panorama with a sweep of hanging willow branches. To the suitable of the composition, a number of characters huddle round a hearth, whose smoke cuts a diagonal swatch throughout the canvas. As one seems extra carefully, the figures appear to have grown along with the bushes and branches surrounding them. In Moonrise (Route 2), 2021, a hazy moon shimmers via a barely overcast sky. Within the backside middle of the picture is the disembodied torso of a legless determine whose head appears to dissolve into the clouds. However who merges into whom: the face into the clouds, or the clouds into the face?

Translated from German by Gerrit Jackson.

— Noemi Smolik