An Unfailing Imprint
Whether viewed from the front or in profile, whether attributed with sleep or contemplation, the face as painted by Takahoshi Sakabe never ceases to waver—or rather, to pour forth—not frozen in a fall that would be humble (averting the gaze, it would forget itself), but barely captured in a rising vertigo, a dizziness that is nothing but light passing through matter, matter steeped in light: it is always the twilight of flesh, of the hour, the minute, the second when silk tears, when stone soaked in gold and dust returns, fragment by fragment, the substance that toils and sacrifices itself to a twilight that never comes.
This mystery of disintegration, which is nothing but vital emergence—this rubbing of brown, ochre, and bronze that wears down and scrapes flesh to make it a landscape—is what Sakabe masters in perfect silence: the tarnished backing of his canvas, which resin seems to have rendered as receptive as the first light-sensitive plates of a Niépce or a Daguerre, creates a mirror effect in which the gaze, tilting imperceptibly, crosses to the other side through slow sedimentation.
And yet everything holds together. The disintegration is only an appearance, and that appearance is the erosion of something deeper: through suppression and attraction, erosion and infiltration.
This mountain, which contends its greens and ochres with the stubborn mist of the canvas, and which a thin thread of a clear road dares not break through; this field with broken contours, abstract, raising around itself a scorched nature; this stretched farmhouse succumbing to moss; these birds drowning in the diffused bark of the branch; these trees, as if overlaid upon their own sap — it seems as though Takayoshi Sakabe had immersed them in the bath of a porous memory in order to return to us their unfailing imprint, their vanishing-becoming.
The possibly twilight halo that reigns here foretells no catastrophe, no upheaval — it suggests an emotion, like an awakening, a surge of consciousness slipping through the folds of dream.
Christophe Claro — Paris, July 1998
A New Sojourn
Christophe Claro — Paris, July 2001
In these recent paintings, something has changed.
The landscape has left behind its former reserve, where its golds and greens lay dormant, to settle into another dimension and position itself at a different distance from the gaze. The lines, though still seemingly tethered to the ineffable, no longer speak of a before, but of an after; the invisible matter they have traversed (which could just as easily be called madness or wisdom, breakthrough or detour)—and still continue to traverse—has allowed them to bring to Takayoshi Sakabe’s much-admired art of appearance a newfound maturity.
As if the artist had suddenly crossed into other invisible strata to position himself behind the subject—be it a hill or a face—and to perform an essential radiography. No longer to show matter in the process of becoming, with its slow unfolding, its rich and discreet infusion, but rather to paint the becoming itself, the deep matter of this becoming, so that each line, each brushstroke, each shadow becomes a destiny of its own.
One can call this process by no other name than miracle.
