Mizue Sawano's Eternal Return

In Sawano's work, the cherry tree and its short-lived blossoms go beyond their customary role as poignant symbols of life’s ephemeral nature that figures so prominently in traditional Japanese poetry and painting.

As in her other cherry blossom paintings, pale lines across the canvas (created through the artist’s “tape-line” method) draw attention to the work’s own facture while creating a multivalent pattern evocative the kaleidoscopic fragmentation of refracted light.

Sawano applies the most sophisticated and classical artistic training of Japan’s Tokyo National University of Fine Arts to a plein air process and subjects of outsize scale and intense chroma to generate works of visceral appeal unified by notions of ceaseless and cyclical return.

Although the inspiration for Sawano’s cherry orchard series and water lily and lotus paintings originally came from within a US metropolis—the grounds of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden—her canvases open onto larger worlds and universal themes.

Nothing more so than the series of paintings depicting the landscapes and street scenes of Assilah, Morocco, where Sawano has continued to visit since her first invitation there in 1998.

The intensity of sunlight in the North African setting, at sunrise and sunset, and as it strikes the white walls of the city, is captured in several of the works shown here, while the motif of the sun was one she used as a unifying symbol for Japan and Morocco in large-scale murals executed in Assilah between 2000-2003.