Fresno Art Museum

Robert Ogata: Between Figure and Ground

Twenty-Five Years of Paintings, Drawings, and Ceramics

 

The Hana series of 2008 is one of the artist’s most beautifully realized body of works - gold leaf enriches the perfection of Hana 2 and is enhanced by the poetic orange calligraphic markings floating between two mysterious white flower-like forms. The chrysanthemum flower appears within Ogata’s often-repeated rectangular form and it is interesting to note that the long downward paint drips falling behind the enormous white flower of Hana 4, is a motif used in the ukiyo-e landscapes of Utagawa Hiroshige, the paintings of the Chinese painter Hung Liu and the Japanese born Masami Teraoka. Both Asian and Western aesthetics are evident in Ogata’s work. In an unusual and unconventional approach, Ogata has used an enlargement of his own thumbprint in the second panel of this monumental diptych that honors the life of the artist’s father. Combining the Zen tenet that the act of painting is a form of meditation and the American abstract expressionist notion that art is best when exuberantly expressive of the individual, Ogata produces an art that embraces multiple perspectives. Another recent work of particular significance is the striking 11-foot wide diptych, Water Lilies, 2008. An unusually vibrant range of cadmium green draws one into the arresting transparency of the scumbled surface intensified by the charcoal-toned drips falling on the pond’s darkness. This same approach is evident in two paintings, one from the Rasenjo series of 2005 with its dramatic black whirlwind like markings that push forcefully to the edges of the canvas, and the other, Core with Rectangle, 2007.

Another aspect that characterizes Ogata’s paintings is the unusual color palette for many of the large-scaled paintings in the Kabuto series of 2002. The brilliance of red strikes against various surfaces of yellow ochre contrasted against triangular V shapes powerfully executed through thrusts of black strokes. These slash marks were inspired by the form found in finely crafted medieval Japanese armor though they can be read as roof and mountaintops and are sometimes inverted. It is the same triangular but crossed shape seen in the diptych Kabuto 7, 2002, but here other black marks are seen as moving linear forms hovering above horizontal scumbles. A preceding series entitled Redbank was one of Ogata’s most prolific, ranging over a three-year period where relationships of color and landscape issues are explored with experimental calligraphic-like marks exemplifying a specific visual language that has been unfolding throughout the artist’s long career. These later works are directly correlated to preceding paintings from the Cipher series (1998 through 2001), and the abstraction of the Rune works of 2002, followed by the provocative Rimpa series of 2003. Confronted by these imposing works, it is clear that Robert Ogata has succeeded in his exploratory quests and experimentations to develop a “language” that is uniquely his own.

The influence of Japanese aesthetics in the Ogata ceramic vessels of the mid-1980s is visible in the various tea bowls, vases, jars and pots of this time. In form and gesture these works seem to have come from medieval Japan in that they have been fired in a traditional anagama, a variation of the 5th century Korean kiln. During the firing the unglazed ware, affected by a directional flame, deposits ash on the shoulders of the ceramic forms, accumulating and forming glaze throughout the several days of firing. Paul Chaleff, who worked with Ogata to construct the kiln, has remarked, “In detail Ogata’s ceramic work is unmistakably American and is a product of his American training and eye.” Rich with allusions to the work of the American ceramicist Peter Voulkos, Ogata has valued so-called defects, as evidenced by one platter’s deep crack. He has deliberately introduced granite stones into the clay, altering the material to suit the concept rather than developing the concept from the sense of material - a purely Western way of working. Just as Ogata has adapted un-traditional methods to his ceramic making, he has chosen experimental approaches in the application of various paints to his canvas surfaces. Ogata’s painting Ensata/Teabowl, 1991, an homage to one of his own most perfectly realized wood-fired tea bowls, is enhanced by a large sensuous white iris. The pale but lush, painterly blue-toned worked surface is contrasted by black rods floating in space and acts as a foil to the two elements. In the use of various mediums, the sheer beauty of the paintings transparent surfaces have been enriched by a vocabulary that incorporates both an Asian and Western approach to the formal aspects of painting.

An uncommon ability for drawing visibly recognizable figures and form could have been capitalized upon by a lesser artist. His gift is clearly evident in the lovely drawings entitled Nymphaea/Water Lilies from 1995 – but here Ogata has chosen to dwell on the transparency of light as transcendental vision. This same quality is seen in the drawing, Pumpkin of 1997 and the 1995 drawings of sticks, mounds and roots that relate to the painting Pale and Sufficient Light of 1993. Included as a major component of the exhibition Between Figure and Ground is the suite of drawings entitled the Internment Camp series. To facilitate President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 of February 1942, all residents of Japanese descent, both U.S. citizens and non-citizens, were ordered to gather at various so-called “Assembly Centers” where evacuees were temporarily housed pending construction of ten “relocation centers” in various western and mid-western states. The 1995 drawings by Robert Katsusuke Ogata for his Internment Camp series are an expression of unleashed emotion following his return after fifty years had passed to the Gila, Arizona relocation camp where he and his family were interred for three years during the course of World War II. The twenty-three drawings that make up this series are deeply felt expressions that reflect the walledoff boyhood memories of the artist’s life – intense emotions that when joined with a learned cultural affinity for the value of restraint and order along with that of the legacy of American Expressionism has become the essential core of Ogata’s oeuvre.

Jacquelin Pilar, Curator
February 2009