Kaoli Mashio

19.20.21

4th December 2021 - 19th February 2022

CLICK HERE for artist’s page

CLICK HERE to order the exhibition catalogue

In 2019, after decades in Europe, Kaoli Mashio spent a term of nine months living in rural Japan. It was not familiar territory: a simple farmhouse, with no modern means of heating or cooling, lost in an unknown countryside, and she had not realised quite how physically extreme the experience would be. For months she did not, could not, remove the layers of thick wool and down that covered her body, her exposed fingers would shake with frost to get the kettle on the stove in the morning, and when the summer came the weight of the sun was intense and overwhelming and inescapable. It was a place where news of global consequence did not hold much tangible bearing, and where the struggle to get warm, or prepare basic food, were the primary concerns of the day. 

Much of the local architecture was constructed of what in German is known as wellblech, wavy sheets of galvanised steel that are welded and nailed together to make walls that are durable, watertight and inexpensive. They are also particularly beautiful, the effect of the rain and the sun through the years painting them brown and pink and green. It could be said that these walls are an embodiment of the aesthetic condition known in Japan as wabi-sabi, the austere, natural beauty of chance that makes timeless, elemental objects. They are also, in the European tradition, perfect Impressionist paintings: the conditions of nature impressed on the material’s surface without even an artist in between. 

In retrospect it feels like there was some serendipity in Mashio’s decision to embark on a series of paintings of the wellblech walls. The coronavirus had by this point taken hold of western China, but was still not much taken seriously anywhere else, and in the small community where Mashio was staying the news went almost undiscussed. She began the paintings not at all in reference to the spreading pandemic, but instead in admiration, out of love, for these galvanised steel walls. Like the walls, the paintings were objects that you could not get around without physically turning away from them, they left no space for the eye to step into or see more deeply than the surface. The paintings were objects based on images but were not images themselves. And most of all, the paintings gave the viewer the sense of looking at something that was physically and literally thin but structurally and timelessly strong.

Soon after her return to Düsseldorf, where she keeps her permanent studio, Germany went into the first of the lockdowns that would define the year ahead. With plenty of time to work on her paintings Mashio continued to pursue the motif of walls, a practice which by now was undeniably taking on new types of meaning. Walls, and the emptiness of public space, were some of the only things that anyone could see, and particularly in the early days of the lockdowns, when no one quite knew what was happening, or how severe the virus was, or what, if anything, could be done about it, going on with what had already been begun offered some comfort and continuity. The sheer unintelligibility of the virus could not possibly find clear expression, but just as they had when they were begun in Japan, the walls in Mashio’s paintings continued to look as her body felt. And in time they became less and less like walls and more and more like paintings. 

Bands of lines that at first look parallel reach out from the top and the bottom. On close-looking, nowhere are these lines replicas of one another. Instead each line seems to have a life of its own, a nature that is almost human. They are mesmerising, and confusing, hassling the eye with their non-conforming conformity. I think they are like crowds of people standing together but not quite still.

The focus of the works became the point of intersection, where the two bands of lines might meet. In some works they connect, meshing and locking, and in others they are kept just apart. In the world outside the studio, any moment of social or physical connection with another had become a treasure and a rarity. Friends and relatives were close but far, and souls reached out for each other. That fragile, delicate space of connection is terribly precious in these works, and compositionally it holds all the power. I am reminded of the gap between the fingers of God and Adam in Michelangelo’s frescoes for the Sistine chapel.

As the year wore on, that fraction of space began to crack open more and more. The darkened, rusty colours of the early canvases became lighter and more varied, and suddenly a bright, soaring sky blue exploded into the works with all the suddenness of a flash of hope. It was as though the wall had become a window, the space of the painting still solid, still thin and strong, but now also deep and infinite, the lines pulling you in and letting you out at once. As the world has opened up the paintings have too, and that blue of the late canvases is a blue that speaks of resolution, of a peace that goes beyond understanding. 

Our lives have changed a lot since 2019, and the memory of the coronavirus pandemic will not be forgotten lightly. Talk of ‘getting back to normal’ became, at some point, talk of a ‘new normal’, one that resembled the times before but which would never be quite the same. And yet, when I look at the series of paintings by Kaoli Mashio presented in this exhibition, which we have elected to show in no particular chronological order, I am also reminded of the small Japanese village in which they were begun, where bodies and minds were focused on staying warm and preparing food. I feel sure that life in that fundamental place is not really all that different now to the life there before the virus: the winter is still freezing cold, and the summer still terribly hot. And I wonder what the people living in that village would make of Kaoli Mashio’s paintings, which began in admiration, empathy and love for their beautiful, weathered walls.