EXHIBITIONS

Tokyo International Gallery presents a Solo Exhibition
“Frangere Magna Caelum” by Yumeno Goto

Goto creates art works based on mythology, folklore, and tarot, depicting the sorrow of people who have been oppressed throughout the long history of the world. Goto describes her work as “a bridge to a world that continues beyond the present,” and continues to weave this grief into her work with the intention of providing relief to women who are suffering and resisting. Goto’s works have a wrought, materialistic feel, as if the raised paint is approaching the real world. In this exhibition, titled “Frangere Magna Caelum (Shattering the Great Sky),” Goto expands from the symbolism of the nude, which she has always depicted, to larger beings such as goddesses and mothers, questioning the meaning of concealment and reapplication, and taking up the challenge of re-creation as revenge for mythology. Please join us and see the chasm between the fantasy world created by Goto.

＜Artist Statement＞

With a chisel in hand, I scratched what I thought was a beautiful part of the painting.

Overlaid on the painting, blood flows in red, brown, black, purple, green, and blue.
Unnatural blood and flesh gurgles in the rolled-up skin appear on the surface of the protruding body.

Our sadness is traced from the wounds we have inflicted,
painting as if to stain and treat what color and what shape it is.

I thought that I could one day create a rift in the world with that wound that spreads as a hole.

The rift that has opened in the world is like the path of the wind flowing from the sun.
The tear, like a cylinder of the sun descending from heaven, that penetrated beneath Mary’s upper garment in the virgin conception, as depicted by medieval artists.

I want to fall into the cracks of the world, upside down, peering comfortably into the sky from the periphery of the scaffolding that seems to be collapsing all the way from the watchtower. Like a dove flying down to conceive.

References
Erich Neumann, The Phenomenology of the Unconscious Woman, Great Mother
Paragraph 28, from a passage in Jung’s “The Structure of Mind “

＜Exhibition Review＞

Welcome to the world of the witches flying through the green forest: —- Painting as Life Form

Mythology, the Bible, literature, and art have long depicted numerous women. The muse, beautified as a passive victim, as in Millet’s “Ophelia,” and witches by Dürer, Brueghel, and Goya. Sensual and seductive women and ugly old women, each painting has its own story to tell. Yet for too long, the women of the painted world have been deprived of their voices.

According to Silvia Federici’s “Caliban and the Witch,” witches are beings that capitalism feared and tried to force to rule; in Mona Schole’s “The Witch,” they are spoken of as beings who preach women’s independence and free life.

The works of Yumeno Goto are also linked to this genealogy of witches’ art. She mixes paints, oils, light, wind, and soil to create a magical world, just as the witches smelt something in their cauldrons. Nevertheless, in this exhibition, “Shattering the Great Sky,” women with oriental expressions, sorrowful yet strong, and soft, develop their own world.

A forest deep in green, light shining on the earth in the late afternoon, swirling rivers and streams of water. The paintings, both large and small, are accompanied by a mineral quality that is grounded in nature, mixed with sand and dust, while being grounded by classical techniques. The forest is the stage on which the energies of destruction and rebirth circulate, the site of secret rituals to which the witches of our time appeal to us.

At the same time, however, the surfaces of these paintings are jagged and rugged, roughly hewn, ripped, nailed, bruised, and punctured. And it is precisely through these rips and scars that the painting seems to acquire its material existence and come to life as a living organism.

The watery, layered base of color, with its wildly cut holes and scars, is like a living organism with the fresh blood and flesh that appears when human skin is gouged out, and within it, the women, all clothed, are breathing. They are not contained in a fantasy two-dimensional world, but rather, they transcend the boundaries of that world and lean forward into the real world in which we live. Come to think of it, witches, called “Hexe” in German, were originally not limited to women. The etymology of the word includes the meaning of “crossing over the boundaries.” By embodying this original meaning, these women, who live on the periphery of the world or on the edges of paintings, are not the mythologized women of the past, but have created their own radical world today, inheriting the traces of the witches and drawing the viewer in and not letting go. These women shake the boundary between the fantastic world of painting and our own world, calling to us and inviting us to join them as dissonant mediators. The frame of the painting is a window for this, a secret door.
　
We experience this space-time as if we were swimming in a world of cruelty and tenderness. They seem to show us the possibility of a truly rich world, a fantastic world where the swirling wildness is fundamentally affirmed through the wild rifts that shatter the pictorial world as they fly across the pictorial frame with the broom of their hearts.

Professor, Graduate School, Tokyo University of the Arts
Tomoko Shimizu