Kazuhiro Kuno – Nostalgic landscapes

What is nostalgia? « A poignant, complex emotion that we feel when a moment or a landscape in the present world revives memories of days gone by that we will never be able to revisit » writes Hitoshi Yamamura, chief curator at Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum. In the last exhibition at the Ueno located Museum devoted to this very precise topic of nostalgia¹, one artist expressed it better than any other: with a few large-format paintings, Kazuhiro Kuno filled the space with infinite nostalgia – panoramas of timeless natural spaces, empty of human presence, long infinite roads, with only a few mountain peaks on the horizon. The only colours are flat patches of green and earthy brown, and the only inhabitants are trees, like these majestic pines whose presence is so strong. Half of the panel is made up of sky – empty clear blueish surface – a way of representing yohaku no bi (‘the beauty of empty space’), a key concept in Japanese aesthetics. Born in the prefecture of Aichi in 1938, the painter, who died in 2022 at the age of 83, never stopped painting the landscapes of Italy, where he lived, studied and travelled. In his Lanscapes of the Earth series, Kuno painted again and again the whereabouts of Tarquinia, in the Roman Latium, where Etruscan ruins are to be found, « a place of unforgettable nostalgia » he visited at the age of 48 years old. His large panorama pictures might remember us of Paul Cézanne’s work (see his majestuous Montagne Sainte-Victoire), though his supreme inspiration is to be found in Giotto, whose frescos had a huge influence on him. 2010 in a publication of the Musashino Art University Press, Kuno wrote: « Standing on the ancient land of Italy having a profound connection with historical time, I gaze at the boundary between the sky and the earth. « Look well at nature. If your art strays from nature, the infinite source of beauty, you will lose your muse and yourself as well. Create the living painting you preserve in your heart. » The voice of the Great master Giotto who preached for a return to nature, seemed to whisper in my ear from far away on the horizon. » From Giotto to Kuno, from Primitive Italy to XXth Century Japan, a same desire to paint the fullness and the emptiness in the nature – the earth and the sky.

Past exhibitions (selection):