GALERIE SABRA

The book In Praise of Shadows by Japanese author Tanizaki was a revelation for Yoko Kumé, with its concept of animating people and objects through a light filter that sculpts shadows. She gradually turned her painterly gaze to the everyday world, to the humdrum objects in her studio, in an effort to surpass their mundanity and bring them to life. She depicts the world around her with great sensitivity, turning her expert hand in the long-practised art of calligraphy to create a magical dialogue between the visual cultures of the East and the West.    

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Her technique is too meticulous and delicate to work in large-scale formats. When she paints a flower, Yoko gives it new life, making it "appear" through her slow process of fluid, transparent, almost weightless material being worked, as if the act of painting itself, through its sensuality and its physical, tangible quality, allows her to access the very existence of this flower.   

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Her paintings are set in a singular space – atmospheric, floating and vibrant. They are figurative, but only after a long period of abstraction and exploration of irreality, in order to give shape to the unshaped, to original chaos. Her titles speak for themselves: Figure intemporelle (Timeless Figure), la beauté suspendue (Suspended Beauty), nuage floral (Floral Cloud) etc. Her canvases do not "represent" very much; this is not what we notice first. Rather, they evoke an atmosphere, a tendency… The figures are secondary, they’re the backdrop, but on Yoko's stage, it’s her extreme sensitivity that’s under the spotlight.