The Brooklyn Rail

In her current show, Petal Storm Memory, Chie Fueki infuses her work with Marcel Proust’s intoxication with colored light—stained glass windows and magic lanterns—along with the graphic energy of Keith Haring, and the “organized delirium” of Hélio Oiticica. Born in Japan but raised in Brazil, Fueki defines herself as a multi-cultural artist now residing in New York’s Hudson Valley. At KinoSaito, an art center in Verplanck dedicated to the work of the Japanese painter and theater designer Kikuo Saito, Fueki combines views from her apartment window in the nearby town of Beacon with paintings made during a recent visit to her mother in Yokohama. Like Proust, she focuses on sunrise and sunset (sunrise in Beacon corresponding to sunset in Japan), collapsing time and space and lending domestic objects a cosmic dimension.

In sharply defined works in a range of media, Fueki embraces the transient effects of shadows and reflections. Objects emerge as silhouettes: potted plants, naively composed on the lower edge of Sunrise Sunset (2023), are backlit, almost solarized, like photograms. Light assumes an active role and uncanny aspect, suggesting the dangers of the sun in a warming world. Fueki’s windows serve as frames within frames, transparent screens that reflect enlarged, cartoon-like representations of her eyes, superimposed on Mount Beacon in Dutchess County. They animate the mountain’s looming silhouette, which recalls that of Mount Fuji in Japan (Fueki has spoken of her “ecstatic experiences” inspired by Japanese mountain worship in Nikko). She expands on the “window paintings” favored by Matisse and Bonnard in related works like Dawn (2022), with its striking orange sky, contrasting frame of yellow and violet, and surrounding wall of red/green filigree. The nocturnal Artemis (2022) recalls the night window paintings of a mentor, Catherine Murphy, albeit with willful exaggerations that reflect the liberating influence of comics. The exaggerated red of You Make Me Sunset (2022), and its direct address to the viewer, add a participatory dimension, as the ringing cellular alarm in its foreground generates an atmosphere of electronic urgency.

Fueki works on mulberry paper, which she mounts on wood panels, using interference pigments to evoke the translucency of traditional Shoji screens. She also creates “paper quilts,” two of which appear in the show: laminated sheets of mulberry paper coated with interference hues, folded and creased along diagonal grids, small screens, to which she adds improvised lines with a brush. Similar diagonal grids underlie the darkened sky of Paper Quilt (Eclipse) (2024), a drama of light and dark evoking outer space. Its exuberant arrays of pink and white marks suggest both eclipses’ apocalyptic associations in popular culture and the science fiction of Japanese Manga, but it’s also informed by Fueki’s serious interest in physics, especially in quantum computing’s potential to reveal unseen worlds.

Marks akin to those of Monet predominate in a group of seven works on paper inspired by night reflections of cherry blossoms along the Ookagawa River in Yokohama. Just as Proust summoned his childhood memories of pink hawthorn blossoms along a crystalline stream, whose transparent waters “solidified” around scraps of bread, Fueki’s colored drawings lend liquid reflections tactility by layering loosely rendered “petal rafts”—impressionistic loops and daubs with geometric glyphs—over gridded horizontal brushstrokes that recall both light seeping through a venetian blind and the digital glow of a computer raster. The dark, spray-painted backgrounds of Yozakura (Noge) (2023) and Yozakura (Petal Raft) (2023) are reminiscent of photographs; Petal Raft evokes a puddle of leaf debris, with floating particles of reflected light, while the pink cartouche suspended in the center of Noge seems a compressed reflection of Eclipse. Fueki injects personal references into this charged context with Petal Storm (Okasan) (2023), which depicts her mother on the riverbank at a distance, a silhouetted shape of white acrylic impasto. Painting (2023), a self-portrait, portrays the artist also in silhouette from behind as she draws, flanked by paired silhouettes of hands, as though in association with some ritual of Brazilian Candomblé. The hands bear multicolored dials in their palms that echo the playfully colored clock high on the wall in Sunrise Sunset. As Proust observes, the world is “a sundial of innumerable aspects.”

The fused layers of the petal rafts suggest an impulse to compress and concentrate her fragmented colors, intuiting the “undivided wholeness” physicist-philosopher David Bohm envisioned in the flux of reality. This impulse assumed fuller form in the installation of a camera obscura Fueki constructed and used during a six-week residency at Kinosaito. Expanding, in real time, the range of her window views, Fueki used an aperture on the window of her darkened studio to project the view outside, upside-down, onto a huge paper quilt, layered in iridescent red and orange, suggesting both a photographic emulsion and the surface of her retina. Taking in everything and nothing in particular, it exemplified her interest in the collective unconscious. Alfred Stieglitz, who urged American artists to engage at a deep level with their new environment, found in photography a link to the subconscious; he didn’t envision a woman born in Japan and raised in Brazil confronting the American landscape. But curator David Ross, in his catalogue essay, probes Fueki’s “meta-observation,” a distancing implicit in windows and inherent in her outsider situation. Combining the geometries of Cubism and Japanese prints, the explosive space of Sunrise Sunset embodies a dialectic of self-reflection akin to Proust’s, a subjective vision both grounded in the Hudson Valley and suspended in a floating world.