Takako Azami: Photosynthesis

Ink manifests itself in many ways - swaying, resting, layering. Blurry black dots and fine delicate lines stand out against the light of white backgrounds. Ink creates outlines, or becomes branches and leaves. Trees emerge as if accorded life.
This is not the representation of a landscape, but the trace of actions. Azami makes her works from the reverse of the picture plane, moving forwards. We see the tones that have oozed out to the front. In most paintings, the last brushstrokes appear on the top, but in Azami’s work it will be the first that take that position. Once an ink mark has been made, no emendation can be made to it, nor any mistake corrected.
This unusual method enables the artist to draw first what is most impressive and visually close, and then to move back to what is afar. In this sense, the order that viewers receive the information matches her own process: Azami first looked at trees and scenery, and then represented them with her brush. Furthermore her then matches our now. This allows for an exceptional viewing experience. I doubt it is possible to control all the flows of ink made in this way, from the reverse.
Azami assembles the painting in her mind, inviting in accidental effects, and makes the whole by judging how ink tones will deposit themselves on the opposite surface. Azami’s works show things that existed there, in the past, but are now transferred and crystalised via her artistic process, to be in turn reconstructed in our experience of looking at them here.

Azami is taken with the leaves and foliage of trees such as pines and plum, often of her own garden. She uses ink to draw oval dots, large and small, and lines on the backside of absorbent hemp paper. She allows the ink to bleed through to the front of the other side of the paper, generating a multi-layered effect and the depth to the plane. Born by chance, this method has been employed since 2000', and she has created many pieces slightly different from one another. Recently she introduces use of color mainly blue color. Her style can be read as the successor of Japanese ink painting Suibokuga, but at the same time she is surely one of the artists who belong to the development of Western abstraction.