The Artist born and raised in a rice farmer family in the prefecture of Shiga moved to Kyoto 1969
In 1972 he will be going to New York
“I wanted to see what the art is doing in New York”
In 1972 he encountered Tokyo Express, an artist collective with students from the Academy of Art Düsseldorf. “With 3000 Mark and a suitcase” Kakedo immigrated to Düsseldorf where he started his painterly fascinating Sujet.
Yoshiyuki Kakedo’s painterly subject expands from singularity into the multitude and vastness of life. Standing close to the canvas, the attempt to count the countless hand-painted dots appears a Sisyphean task. Imagining the time the artist devoted to the creation of an oeuvre comprising around 800 works largely escapes the grasp of the rational mind. Whilst someone sitting with oil and brush for a good part of the eternity that resonates from his canvases is primarily considered a painter, Kakedo's practice may also be understood as an expression of a lifelong path shaped by Buddhist philosophy and practice.
When looking at the works, a strikingly physical sensation takes hold of the beholder. From a single painted dot unfolds a sense of endlessness. The idea that the singular contains the whole appears encoded within the composition and rendered visually relatable. The paintings evoke the concept of oneness, the understanding that all phenomena arise in mutual interdependence and are ultimately inseparable from one another.
Yoshiyuki Kakedo’s practice birthed these fields continuously over a timespan of 40 years, in shades and movements breathing and pulsating, gravitating towards the centre and radiating into infinity. The attention can not but settle and quiet.
The canvas, stretched over the frame surpasses its physical dimension. Thereby, the physical expansion seem to transmit a meditative presence, where vastness and focus move as one.These dots oil paint in precise consistency float above the canvas, forming valleys and oceans, horizons and expanse.
Yoshiyuki Kakedo is a Japanese artist renowned for his distinctive approach to fine art, blending expressive impressionism with meticulous pointillism. His career spans decades and continents, with exhibitions in Kyoto, Düsseldorf, and Altdorf. Through the renovation of a former synagogue in Altdorf, Kakedo and his partner the artist Isolde Wawrin establish a public exhibition space that today houses his complete oeuvre.
Text by: Kira Schmieg, Curator MAHAMAYAMA Curation Office