Takao Tanabe Exhibition - Capsule Review

TAKAO TANABE

EQUIONOX GALLERY

JANUARY 17, 2019 - MARCH 2, 2019

Takao Tanabe’s landscape paintings make you stop and look; his works are quiet in a world so loud. The colours used are muted with sparks of bright thin lines. He captures the light and the hues of the natural world, to evoke certain feelings of melancholy. The ocean is a central theme in Tanabe’s compositions. He paints landscapes we have seen growing up in British Columbia. The familiar. His use of paint to create a fog effect is intriguing. There is always a light piercing through the darkness. The reflection of the mountains on the water is poetic in visual form. The trees are captures as faint ghosts in the background. There is a delicate way he uses the brush to convey emotion and other times to create chaos. Although they are landscape paintings, they are broken down to colours and form. Your eye sees the recognizable, yet something new. The release of water on the paint gives the paint a dated look, almost like you just stumbled upon vintage photographs. You feel a sense of longing, searching for home, when looking out into the distance. Other times you are confronted with a sunny place. The stillness in these landscapes is what attracts me to them. I see influences of Japanese ink drawings and the way the ink created the narrative. The drips allow my eye to travel. Takao combines eastern landscape drawings with contemporary abstract expressionism in his depictions of the spaces that inspire him most.