Kurofune: Louis Savage Exhibition

Kurofune takes its name from the word meaning ‘blackships’ in Japanese – a symbol of the coming out of isolation, and the name given to Western vessels arriving in Japan in the 16th and 19th centuries.

Saoku – was the policy of isolation that Japan embarked on during this time, when no foreigner could enter and nor could any Japanese leave – or face a penalty of death, this continued for many years.

It is this two-fold idea of cutting oneself off from the rest of the world, the benefits and disadvantages of isolation, and also philosophical ideas of The Self and its isolation from The Other, that sparked the exploration of woven brush marks in Louis latest body of work. He paints vast densely packed canvases, that pulse with a rhythmic energy that instantly awaken an emotional response. His paintings captivate you.

Within his oeuvre there are: autobiographical elements, attempts to understand the solipsism in everyday life, the understanding of the individual in relation to others and their environment, and the philosophy of language and communication.

Louis’ main desire to understand identity, perception and reality has brought him to concepts he can question in his work, he likens identity to a spiders web, whose different strands form our beliefs and understandings and are stretched out in different directions, when individual strands move or are broken the web shifts, adapting, taking on a slightly different shape and continuing to function in this new formation.

His work starts methodically, then within that framework is allowed to deviate off as discoveries are made through the process of painting, going through a multitude of different states with different real time experiences and ideas feeding into the canvas and developing over time, latticed together in a state of ordered chaos.

This choreographed disorder, and splicing of ideas within Louis’ work is what makes it so inviting. The great expanses of his pieces are all consuming. They challenge you to decipher them, yet like a visual “Wittgenstein ladder” at the same time make the viewer accessible to themselves, giving a starting point and leaving it open to interpretation, giving you the steps for the climb upward within yourself.

In his piece The Inability to Make Another Feel What it’s Like to be Unable to Make Another Feel (Relic Radiation), his starting point was in thinking about the precariousness of reality – everything in flux but at the same time being beautifully balanced. Coming out of research into the conditions at the exact moment of the ‘Big Bang’, just how drastically different the entire universe would have been if any of the core variables had even slightly changed, and transferring this concept onto our personal lives too. The painting leaves itself in a moment between aesthetic explosion or collapse, of everything being completely disordered, but for this moment just right.

His conceptual standpoint is that the painting once completed is a fixed piece, it cannot change. But, you as a viewer can and will, so each reading of his paintings will change over time, what you gain will be dependent of many internal and external variables, making you, the individual as much part of the work as he the painter.

Louis Savage “My practice involves constructing a large array of preparatory work which is then rather randomly applied in strata during the painting process. The finished work finds itself out of this conflict and the visual vibration between the layers of marks and colours.

Rather than minimalists aiming for a reduction down, my interest lies in an explosion outward, of imagery and the connections and possibilities between the images, finding that within this ungraspable plane that some form of essential personal internal development can arise”.