I love these abstract paintings by Osamu Kobayashi. They’re wonderful colour fields that are heavily textured; varnished, thick, thin, fluid, smooth, encrusted, washed, intuitively created and mesmerising.
Kobayashi has an instinctive knowledge of how colour and form behave, many of his paintings exuding a calmness, a reflective position that asks us to do nothing more than appreciate the act of painting and how colour, texture and form can create their own narrative. Here’s what he has to say about his work:
The process of painting is a power struggle. I take my painting one way; it wants to go somewhere else. And when it goes somewhere else; I drag it in another direction. In the end, the painting usually wins.
My work is reductive in form nudging at representation, and employs a spontaneous and intuitive array of colours, shapes, and textures. Using these elements I create visual dualities: chance vs. control, organic vs. geometric, warm vs. cool, large vs. small, etc.
Like a good story, the elements that comprise each work push and pull off of each other, creating a unified structure that stays contained but never becomes subdued within its own parameters.
The goal is to create work with a sensation similar to that of a clear thought: the idea has its bases covered; there’s no room for argument. In reality, however, these paintings can never be clear thoughts. They are much more open than that. They are more of a confrontation: between what I desire to know and what I can never know entirely.