Yasuki Hara

Reviews

Kazuo Kashima [Art Critic]

Shake your eyes and fascinate
In today's metamodern (ultra-modern), any form is free from isms and factions. Yasuki Hara, who creates his own abstract expressions, is an unusual contemporary artist who does not reflect traces of the times in his paintings.
Hara cuts out all flesh-and-blood bodies, private lives, ideological beliefs, autobiographical and social elements from paintings. Hara's work, in which reality and one's inner self do not respond, has no linguistic "subject" and is a painting that appeals only to the visual. The phrase "for your eyes only" is a phrase that symbolizes Hara's brilliant paintings.
Hara believes that the essence of painting lies in a unique visual experience. It is in this formative thinking that Yasuki Hara has pride. The viewer should encounter the work in a purely visual connection and have a straightforward visual experience. Hara paints by replacing the paintbrush with a sponge that frees the colors from the power of the hand and the brushstrokes. It is a precise technique based on calculations, and even line drawing is a skilled technique of drawing colors on the corners and edges of the sponge.
But technique is for expression. What is important is that Hara has acquired a unique abstract form in the process of many years of creative activity. The Hara's works, which are the original development of modernist figurative thinking, block illusions, shake the viewer's vision, and fascinate them.
The colors on the screen are supposed to invite you to a visual experience where the screen is shaken by disturbance, while stabbing and fighting with each other, repelling and harmonizing.
This exhibition has the nature of a retrospective of his works since '07, but I am convinced that it will be a solo exhibition that fascinates with the latest pictorial achievements along with the footprints of Yasuki Hara's plastic innovation.

2023 Fukuoka Asian Art Museum "Yasuki Hara Exhibition" Contribution

Ryoichi Hirai [Art Critic]

I first learned about Yasuki Hara's work two years ago through the introduction of Tetsuya Miyata ("Dynamism and Vibration" Two-Person Exhibition, Steps Gallery). The contrast of vivid colors first caught my eye.
Even though it wasn't very big, I think it had a surprising purity and brilliance on the color surface that filled the screen. When it comes to color surfaces, depending on the paint and the method of applying it, the material usually acts on such vividness to determine the shape and appearance of the color surface. In Mr. Hara's case, as far as I saw it two years ago, it seemed to shine like the surface of a silk gauze or lightweight fabric, which is intricately woven with soft raw silk.
I can't know of a detailed Mr. Hara's work so far. However, in the case of the year before last, I was impressed by an example of how this color surface was not taken from some other shape or made into some specific shape, but was trying to take a step toward a shape that could be formed clearly and naturally.
This is probably something that Mr. Hara himself said was a thorough orientation for a state of "transparency that does not hide anything, intertwining three colors with a layer of thin painted streaks." I thought that the overlapping color surfaces of the "thinly painted streaks" that are painstakingly drawn and repeated are probably the source of structural decisiveness and characteristics that are probably unparalleled.
And I'm interested to see how it turns out.

2017 "Yasuki Hara – Pierce Colors Exhibition" Tokyo, Fukuoka. Contribution