ART COLLABORATION KYOTO 2025

Thirteen paintings are arranged in an imagined garden, alternating in intensity and nodding to creation myths. In Two Blossoms in a Dream, petals part around a yolk center. Earth splits from sky. The stems in a darker work, Flowers in the Evening Wind, are faint, umbilical cord-thin. The haloed flowers atop loom close. Their frontality is a device used since antiquity (later echoed by Baya, Picasso, Matisse) to convey authority, and a sacred presence.

As Rothko did with color, Kamijo lets his florals take up space. Three large flowers, resembling blood vessels, saturate a canvas. Elsewhere, velvet camellias bloom fat under a clay-colored cloud. In Blooming Along the River, slabs of foliage deepen into opacity, sealing out the sun. The simplified forms hold their edge between color and space, a pared-down clarity Milton Avery also held to.

These newer works carry Kamijo’s idiom: biomorphic clusters, flat planes edged with line, thin-lipped horizons. They recall the botanicals of ukiyo-e prints, now with a newfound gravity. Indigo flesh. A sweetheart neckline. Pistils press forward. The flowers, long an emblem of fleeting existence, are open, dramatized, full of weight.

Written by Paige Haran

Courtesy Perrotin.