Kenjiro Okazaki
À un moment, quelque part — disparaître ainsi, sans bruit, comme un nuage qui se défait dans le ciel. / 桜島 Mt. Sakurajima (blue) / San Bartolomeo ti proteggerà. Ha fermato la lava del vulcano nell'eruzione del '41 / Stromboli (red), 2026
Acrylic on canvas
Set of two
20.4 x 16.5 x 3 cm
(8 x 6 1/2 x 1 1/8 in.)
20.6 x 16.6 x 3 cm
20.4 x 16.5 x 3 cm
(8 x 6 1/2 x 1 1/8 in.)
20.6 x 16.6 x 3 cm
À un moment, quelque part — disparaître ainsi, sans bruit, comme un nuage qui se défait dans le ciel. 桜島 Mt. Sakurajima (Blue) Source: Hayashi Fumiko, Ukigumo (Floating Cloud), 1949–51...
À un moment, quelque part — disparaître ainsi, sans bruit, comme un nuage qui se
défait dans le ciel. 桜島 Mt. Sakurajima (Blue)
Source: Hayashi Fumiko, Ukigumo (Floating Cloud), 1949–51
The novel follows two lovers adrift in postwar Japan — they met during the Japanese
occupation of French Indochina, where the abundance and freedom of the tropics made their passion possible. Returned to a defeated, impoverished Japan, they cannot come together and cannot separate. The woman, Yukiko, follows the man to the remotest point she can reach — the island of Yakushima — and dies there alone, hemorrhaging in the rain. The novel’s final line: “He was like a floating cloud — dissolving, somewhere, sometime, without a trace.” The French title is a translation of that sentence.
The blue painting: horizontal strata, accumulated and compressed, the red beneath
suppressed but not gone. A landscape of sedimented time. The canvas does not erupt — it drifts.
San Bartolomeo ti proteggerà. Ha fermato la lava del vulcano nell'eruzione del '41 / Stromboli (Red)
Source: Roberto Rossellini, Stromboli, terra di Dio, 1950
A Lithuanian refugee woman, Karin, escapes an Italian internment camp by marrying a
fisherman from Stromboli. The island crushes her — volcanic rock, primitive isolation, a
husband who cannot understand her. The priest’s words — Saint Bartholomew will protect you; he stopped the lava in the eruption of ’41 — are the island’s founding myth: that a saint’s intervention arrested molten rock. The film ends with Karin collapsing on the volcano’s flank, crying out to God.
The red painting: eruption, rupture, the canvas split by the wooden frame into two masses that press against each other without merging. Lava that was stopped — and the scar of the stopping.
T H E T W O T O G E T H E R
Both works: 1949–50. Both: a woman displaced by war, stranded on a volcanic island at the edge of the world, unable to leave and unable to stay.
Blue is the force of dissolution — disparaître sans bruit, to vanish without sound. Red is the force of arrest — ha fermato la lava, he stopped the lava.
One Japanese, one Italian. One asks what it means to disappear. The other asks what it means to be stopped.
défait dans le ciel. 桜島 Mt. Sakurajima (Blue)
Source: Hayashi Fumiko, Ukigumo (Floating Cloud), 1949–51
The novel follows two lovers adrift in postwar Japan — they met during the Japanese
occupation of French Indochina, where the abundance and freedom of the tropics made their passion possible. Returned to a defeated, impoverished Japan, they cannot come together and cannot separate. The woman, Yukiko, follows the man to the remotest point she can reach — the island of Yakushima — and dies there alone, hemorrhaging in the rain. The novel’s final line: “He was like a floating cloud — dissolving, somewhere, sometime, without a trace.” The French title is a translation of that sentence.
The blue painting: horizontal strata, accumulated and compressed, the red beneath
suppressed but not gone. A landscape of sedimented time. The canvas does not erupt — it drifts.
San Bartolomeo ti proteggerà. Ha fermato la lava del vulcano nell'eruzione del '41 / Stromboli (Red)
Source: Roberto Rossellini, Stromboli, terra di Dio, 1950
A Lithuanian refugee woman, Karin, escapes an Italian internment camp by marrying a
fisherman from Stromboli. The island crushes her — volcanic rock, primitive isolation, a
husband who cannot understand her. The priest’s words — Saint Bartholomew will protect you; he stopped the lava in the eruption of ’41 — are the island’s founding myth: that a saint’s intervention arrested molten rock. The film ends with Karin collapsing on the volcano’s flank, crying out to God.
The red painting: eruption, rupture, the canvas split by the wooden frame into two masses that press against each other without merging. Lava that was stopped — and the scar of the stopping.
T H E T W O T O G E T H E R
Both works: 1949–50. Both: a woman displaced by war, stranded on a volcanic island at the edge of the world, unable to leave and unable to stay.
Blue is the force of dissolution — disparaître sans bruit, to vanish without sound. Red is the force of arrest — ha fermato la lava, he stopped the lava.
One Japanese, one Italian. One asks what it means to disappear. The other asks what it means to be stopped.
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