Brake, Big Flood

Born in Osaka in 1940, Keiji Usami was an artist representing the Japanese contemporary art scene. Usami began to teach himself painting, and he started systematic creation of paintings by employing four human figures taken from a news photograph of the 1965 Watts riots in Los Angeles, circles and gradation. In 1966, Usami’s work was exhibited in The New Japanese Paintings and Sculpture at MoMA in NY. In 1968, Usami unveiled LASER=BEAM=JOINT, the first work in Japan using laser beam. His work from the same series exhibited in Japan World Exposition, Osaka 1970 received attention. Usami continued producing his works both in Japan and abroad, including those exhibited at the Venice Biennale 1972. The four symbolized human figures, which Usami repeatedly used and transformed, became his lifelong motif to compose paintings as “thinking space” for people of the same era and their world experience. Usami wrote a number of books and practiced his art theory described in the books in creating paintings.

Leonard da Vinci depicted humans, cattle, rock, houses, and everything pulled into huge vortices in Studies of Water, the drawings of his last years. Leonard drew water, or big flood, in the studies as if it would engulf the nature and perspective, a technique of drawing pictures, and crush everything. Leonard drew surging waves and images failing to realize perspective, which was supposed to have established, as if to go back to the Middle Ages, and filled the drawings where creation and destruction are balanced with energy.
Usami committed to creating paintings with big flood as their subject from the late 2000s. Painted in the period of Usami’s last years, Brake, Big Flood on the huge 3m x 6 m canvas as large as a mural is comprehensive integration of his paintings.