trang picked up on the "Painting for Joy" exhibition, highlighting works in painting by more or less contemporary Japanese artists, and invited me in part because some of Yoshitomo Nara's work is showing there ('there' being the McClelland Gallery out in Langwarrin, which I now know to be somewhere in the Frankston direction). And I liked looking at the Naras - five all up, all rather characteristic, including the "Little Red Riding Hood" that has been reproduced quite a lot - but my favourites were two others, neither of whose artists I'd heard of before.
The highlight for me was definitely Takanobu Kobayashi's "Gate", which put me very much in mind (the turn of phrase is deliberate) of Magritte. There's a simplicity and a sense of space to it, but it's also very much framed - it's a perspective as immediately and subjectively present and constructed, flat with intimations of depth. The gate in the foreground which dominates the painting proves, on closer inspection, to be mounted on castor wheels and hence presumably movable; moreover, it's distinctly sky-like in appearance, and not only that, but its cloud hues appear to extend to the thin grey strip at the bottom of the picture which we had previously been presuming was the ground. Then there's the matter of the 'trees' in the background - and the unaccountable regular poles (trunks?) with which they are intersheaved. All in all, it's a kind of pictorial representation of how I feel that I see the world, not least in its slightly disorienting dream-likeness.
The other which particularly appealed was Makoto Aida's "Pavement of Yukiko Okada", a series of panels arranged four by four and each a variation on the same general theme - a face or a tree, depending on which panel one looks at and how one looks. Each has a different colour scheme and character and hints suggestively at meaning (both individually and taken as a whole, each all at once in that familiar hermeneutic circle) - it's quite abstract but also quite conventionally aesthetically pleasing which made me think of the European impressionist style (while also, no doubt influenced by the context in which I was viewing it, seeing cherry blossoms and other 'Asian' motifs in its patterns).
(I was also drawn to the Op Art-type "Jungle Gym" pieces by Nobuhiko Nukata - reminded me of Bridget Riley, though I like what I've seen of her's more.)
Also had a look at the Louise Weaver, since it was on in the same building. It seemed to be a career-spanning retrospective of sorts, and her thing is basically the creation of new forms and effects through crocheting and stitching onto and over existing 'canvasses' of various kinds - some quite large and installation-like, others more intimate. I was much more drawn to the neat textural effects she had achieved with relatively restrained stitching on to paper, coupled with linedrawings, etc, and the cute, similarly restrained ones she'd done with black-and-white wildlife photography of animals (especially the bear one), than to the larger-scale monochromatic ones.
And also walked through the gardens to look at the sculptures scattered about - especially liked "homespace", an almost pitch dark shed with many little lights set into its ceiling and a reflective surface below, so that walking on it produced a giddy sense of wavering depthlessness and being somehow above the stars.
