Kiyoka Yamagata, a painter who interweaves emotional memories with colors,
extracts universal emotional structures from microscopic phenomena embedded in daily life through vivid chromatic expressions, thereby creating aesthetic experiences that resonate with the subconscious. Having engaged in painting since childhood, she has consistently exhibited her works in galleries and art fairs both domestically and internationally since 2009. Her colorful creations, emerging from a dialogue between emotion and material, profoundly stir the heart, inviting one into an introspective landscape of emotions.
Yamagata's oeuvre constitutes an endeavor to reconstruct the subjective movements of the psyche, which often defy linguistic articulation, into a visual lexicon of color, form, and space. This pursuit can be likened to a journey to express latent emotions residing deep within the heart. Her inspiration emanates from the phenomenological beauty discernable within the quotidian. The inherent structures within unassuming landscapes, the emotive expressions manifested on human faces, or the endearing forms of anilmals, these coalesce at certain moments, emerging onto the mnemonic surface as incisive chromatic representations. Colors intrinsically linked to diverse emotions such as joy, sorrow, poignancy, and hope resonate with memories of past events and encounters, profoundly influencing her artistic genesis. This phenomenon can be interpreted as fragments of emotion being reconstituted into meaning when bathed in the light of color.
Through a contemplative rumination on these intrinsic elements, Yamagata meticulously layers pigments over time until the emotion manifests in its most pristine form. While primarily employing oil paints, she integrates various media such as acrylics, pastels, and oil pastels to generate a multifaceted texture and visual profundity within her works. Beyond the conventional use of brushes and knives, the direct application of paint by hand facilitates a fundamental communion between the artist, the material, and her inherent spirituality, akin to directly imprinting emotions onto the canvas. In this creative process, emotion occasionally precedes the artistic impulse, while at other times, the material itself guides the expression toward unforeseen trajectories. Chance operation is also a vital component of her compositional methodology, where novel discoveries and aesthetic values emerge from unpredictable occurrences. This process is metaphorically described as the artist herself navigating an emotional landscape, seeking new pathways within it.
The vibrant and diverse chromatic palette not only expresses vitality and dynamism but also embodies the richness of emotion. The layering of colors and brushstrokes visually articulates the fluctuations of emotion and the passage of time, while the matière delineates layers of memory and emotional profundity. Her works are characterized by the expression of complex psychological structures that transcend a simplistic binary opposition, even while encompassing contrasting elements such as experiential memory and reality, the present and the past.
Yamagata's works are a landscape of emotions. And the vivid colors represent a journey of hope.