Gideon Rubin

Yōga

14th September - 7th November 2023

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At my home in London, there is a wonderful work of the Utagawa School, a woodblock print by one Yoshifusa Utagawa, published in the late 1850s. It depicts ‘The Ghost of Akugenta Taking Revenge on Nanba at the Nunobiki Waterfall’, but I only know this because that is its title - I do not know who Akugenta or Nanba are, nor why one is taking revenge on the other. I do not know the whereabouts of the waterfall, nor even whether it is real or imagined. My failure to know these things does not make the work any less beautiful, in fact it makes it more beguiling. I like not being able to understand it.

At the time this print was made Japan had been cut off from the world for the best part of three centuries. In 1603, the Tokugawa shogunate had installed the policy of sakoku, or ‘locked country’, effectively secluding its islands and their people from all foreign influence. This led to an artistic and aesthetic development that is unusually singular, its only range of influence having been the images of its own past.

When Japan did finally begin to reveal itself, which happened cautiously around the same time as this print was made, its images were different to anything European eyes had ever seen. Their effect on European painting was substantial, most notably for Van Gogh, Whistler, and other employers of so-called ‘Japonisme’. The converse was also true: the exposure of Japanese artists to Western techniques in the mid-19th century brought vast new possibilities for image- makers. I am told, for example, that the triptych format of my

Utagawa print is the result of exposure to European altarpieces. The arrival of foreign influence in Japan led to the establishment of two distinct and often competing schools of painting: nihonga, which employs traditionally Japanese techniques, and yōga, or ‘Western-style painting’, where oils and other European methods are applied to the image of Japan.

When it comes to Japan, Gideon Rubin is, like me, inevitably an outsider looking in. Born in Tel Aviv, he moved to London to study painting at the Slade School of Art, and has continued to live in Europe ever since. His recent travels in Japan were the fulfilment of a long-held dream; he knew it only through its literature and images which, like my print, he can not fully understand and which likewise have made it no less beguiling. The policy of sakoku ended more than 150 years ago, and economically and politically Japan is now as much a part of the conceptual ‘West’ as any country in Europe, but its culture, its image, still feels far away, almost as inscrutable as ever, and no less fascinating for it.

Rubin is a painter of considerable mastery, and his use of oil and linen rather than ink and silk means that he must be described in this context as a painter of yōga. For the series of paintings presented here, most of which are based on photographs, some the artist’s own, others drawn from the rich history of postwar Japanese photography, we are presented with an image of Japan as it has appeared to an outsider’s eyes, painted using an outsider’s techniques. Using photographs has been helpful in this regard: the artist has said that having finally been to Japan he understands it less than ever, so to paint using intermediary images, in other words, to maintain a little distance, offers a degree of space for reflection.

Unlike the 19th century European painters of ‘Japonisme’, who took from the Japanese images that came to them new forms of perspectival flatness and compositional framing, Rubin’s paintings maintain an essentially European formal mode. Further, he has for the most part removed the more overt signs of place-ness that might have more obviously identified his subject. Flowers here sit only in emptiness, rowing boats on lakes of nothing, the figures have no faces. Many of these paintings could, in fact, be images of anywhere.

Nonetheless, there is I think something essentially Japanese about all these paintings, something closer perhaps to its aesthetic spirit than its specific visual signs are needed for.

This Magnolia for instance, with its colour like the cherry blossoms of Kyoto, and which connects to the pattern of the lady’s obi in Kimono: there is nothing here to identify Japan, and yet it is a very Japanese painting. A single magnolia, bright against the darkness of the window pane. It is almost a painted haiku.

In this way the image of Japan presented here is closer to the Japanese literature the artist loves than to the history of yōga. In works like Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country, or Junichiro Tanizaki’s Naomi, it is the sparsity of language, the elimination of description, that gives the writing its elegance and which makes up much of its aesthetic position. That descriptive austerity, full of empty silences and things unsaid, is just what Rubin achieves in paint when he strips an image of its specificity. There is a painting of the nape of a woman’s neck, Black Shirt, where the pale, exposed, blemish-less skin is juxtaposed with the pattern of her shirt, which is black with blood-red markings. For me it’s a contrast of violence and innocence, of perfectly smooth skin and the unseen gory flesh beneath it. This is not described in the painting, it is just in my head, but I have been given the space to see this on my own without having been given it to see. We can quote Tanizaki in Some Prefer Nettles: ‘isn’t it really better to leave things only hinted at?’.

Gideon Rubin’s Yōga paintings are more readable for me than my Utagawa print, because they are painted in a language I have grown up with and thus can more readily understand. But that empty space where my own eyes and soul can play a part in the construction of meaning, the painter’s elimination of description that lets me add in my own, means that there is always more to see in these paintings, more room for things to grow. It is a pleasure to see paintings that, like the print, one can not know completely. I like not being able to understand.

Fraser Brough, CASSIUS&Co.