坂井淑恵　SAKAI Yoshie

Sakai Yoshie was born in Chiba Prefecture in 1965, and grew up in Wakayama Prefecture. In 1993, she completed her degree at the Graduate School of Arts, Department of Painting, Kyoto City University of Arts. Since the 1990s, she has consistently produced paintings base on the theme of “the sense of distance” and “boundaries” between oneself and others that is necessary for humans to exist. Her human forms are typically reduced to minimal images of a face and legs. But beginning from the time she captured an expression of “water” that could represent the “in between” image itself, her human figure began to show various changes in relationships. She achieved this in such ways as submerging the figure under water, or by positioning it so that only its head could be glimpsed on the water surface. Her drama between a person and water conveys a strong sense of tension, while also always being unpredictable. In her newest works (Shine and Flicker, 2010) that were on exhibit, she took on a new development in which the artist’s thoughts were focused on the inner side where the green water itself dwells.

Sakai Yoshie gained recognition in the 1990s through her expression of water surfaces and human figures reduced into simple forms, based on the theme of “the sense of distance” and “boundaries” between oneself and others living in society. The “water” that occupies a large portion of Sakai’s paintings, expressed in clear green and blue colors, reveals a style characterized by “colors” (which also relates to Section I). This exhibition will showcase the development of her works in her green-water variation, with Sign, which she first showed in 2009, seen as the initial work. Up until that time, the artist gazed upon the borderline between the inner and outer sides of “water.” But in creating this series, she seems to have “dived” into the water and melted herself into the particles of water, to the extent that she no longer has a human shape, while also transmitting messages to the world from under the water. This series allows one to imagine how the dazzling and glistening sunlight seen from inside the water might look in such ways as in her works. Nonetheless, the artist does not confine herself to the inner side; rather, one can infer that the artist is flexibly and acutely responding to the stimuli in the external world from the inside of the water.
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　(Translated by NANPEI Taeko)