Into the Light, 2024

Fusako Ekuni  

Fusako Ekuni is a Japanese artist born in 1947 and who lives & works in Tokyo, Japan. The artist is graduated from Musashino Art University, Faculty of Visual Communication Design and Musashino Gakuen, the faculty of Japanese Art Style Painting. She is a great contemplative artist who fuses light with colour, Fusako Ekuni has taken on the challenge of projecting our soul's eternal perceptual connectivity to something very simple – light. Colours are treated with an instinct, the ritual inherent to Fusako Ekuni's paintings involve the physics of the process itself. The slow process, the seeming point of emergence or disappearance these perpetual, eternal, changeable colour flows embody are less like paintings than beatific slow motion reifications of the physics of life…These paintings are homages to the pre-verbal universe, where the invisible forces of life - colour and light – interact magically, seemingly invisibly. The artist is the medium. Like the Spanish Surrealist Juan Miro, Fusako Ekuni is producing several paintings simultaneously. At different stages of completion, each painting can take months until the colours complete their harmonic journey into completion. The artist is an eternal seeker. For 18 years, Fusako Ekuni has moved from a traditional Japanese art style to explore a more fluid process that involves layering pure dry pigment and glue, placing these elements intuitively onto board to produce works that embody a feeling of slow flow… The colours relate as people do, one to the other, in a perpetual slow flow. A particular particularized, sub-atomic beingness associated with light is what results. This interest in the physics of light is ever present in Fusako Ekuni's Into the Light series. Like James Turrell's Roden Crater project in the Arizona Desert, the content in Fusako Ekuni's art is ultimately this existential interaction between our eye's perception and colour light compositions that always seem to be at a point of change. Fusako's sense of light and colours as elements in and for themselves an artist works with recall the American painter Richard Pousette-Dart's painterly explorations. Art becomes a source where the ideas are simply phenomena, visual and colourful. Light is the binding medium the colours interact with. The sense of simple presence and absence, of feelings and emotions likewise recalls Mark Rothko's contemplative colour compositions. One colour next to another colour, overlapping or meeting, becomes a topography of feelings, of placement, it is all in these words, Fusako Ekuni's sense of immediacy, of the moment, of how colour is perceived before we read its forms – as colour - in light.