Oriental Wall 1970

Hiroyuki Tajima's 'Oriental Wall' is like a secret language etched in color and texture. You can almost feel the artist's hand at work, layering shades of blue, green, and brown, one over the other. The surface has a kind of broken quality, like something ancient, or made up of a million tiny maps, each one slightly different. Notice that vertical line of light blue in the middle, it shimmers! It feels like a hidden doorway, or a crack in the wall that lets the light come flooding in. The brown, ochre and green shades form fields around this core of energy, it's very striking. It makes me think of how the Abstract Expressionists, like Barnett Newman, used color to create these monumental, emotional spaces. But here, Tajima brings a touch of something very old and very personal, like a conversation between East and West, between the past and the present.