Kentaro Okumura at Vardaxoglou Gallery, by Sam Cornish
Kentaro Okumura’s small-scale paintings are at once open and evasive. Some contain a simple, easily readable image, a house, or people at a bar. Most blur into different degrees of hazy partial legibility. A swimmer glimpsed on a gloomy sea; elsewhere, and less certainly, a figure lying on a beach. Titles are only occasionally illuminating. Road, 2024 is a first glance straightforward. But the view is disconcertingly aerial, and the central motif appears more a crooked stairway than a highway, or perhaps even a rudimentary arm, bent at the elbow, a hint at the curious sense of bodily intimacy that appears throughout the exhibition. None of the paintings suggest an artist directly observing their subject. Instead, they appear as simplified signs located between imagination and memory. Even those paintings that are almost entirely abstract imply a scene just beyond visualisation, as if a moment of light or space could be recalled but not whatever it was that this light and space once enveloped. Okumura paints in this ambiguous realm with just enough directness and feeling to counteract the peril of vagueness. If his starting points are immaterial, his approach to them is tactile, as if trying to recall an image with his finger-tips.
Kentaro Okumura, Road, 2024, oil on canvas, 35.5 x 45.5 cm, 14 x 17 7/8 ins
Despite its small and somewhat awkward size, Vardaxoglou Gallery has become one of the best places in London to look at paintings, with a programme that is carefully considered, personal without being overly self-conscious, and aware of a wider context without feeling contrived. The emphasis is on sensitively displayed, quietly tough painting, often with a conceptual edge. The muted palette and equivocation between abstract and figurative languages that are hallmarks of English modernism are brought into the present by a predominately London-based but international roster. Okumura shares these qualities with other gallery artists, most notably Lewis Brander, Tanoa Sasraku and Shaan Syed; Thérèse Oulton and the Robyn Denny Estate provide a direct connection to the British art of the twentieth century.
Each of the ten paintings on canvas in the current exhibition is given room to breathe, while the intimate, enclosed gallery allows a beguiling atmosphere to develop. Thinking back on the experience a few days later, I wondered how Okumura’s images would fair beyond this protective cocoon. Isolated in the wider world, their suggestive murmur might fade into blank muteness. Did some of the paintings need their partially spoken lines completed by those that surrounded them? This vulnerability should perhaps be accepted as part of the feeling they seek to convey.
Kentaro Okumura, Untitled, 2024, oil on canvas, 50 x 74 cm, 19 3/4 x 29 1/8 ins
Two images break from the muted, gently glowing earth and flesh tones that run through the exhibition as a whole. Both are hidden from immediate sight, facing each other at the back of the gallery. Untitled, 2024 is perhaps the standout painting of the exhibition. A band of bright-dark gloaming-sky-blue appears at over the horizon of a scumbled bank of brown, framing an open lattice of red, part unreadable text, part cloud formation, part drawn-in-space sculpture. It has a simple immediacy, and a kind of freshness, as if it had just been made or come into view. You can almost feel the breeze blowing through it. On the opposite wall, Ghetto Whiskey, Kahawa West, 2025 is the odd man out. By some way the largest work here, its orange-green colour scheme feels almost shocking amongst its peers, as its biomorphic forms loom over you. Enlivening, but perhaps too reliant on gestural drama, here there is a sense of force and speed, but also a clunkiness, that is not apparent elsewhere in the show. One of two paintings dated this year (the others are all 2024) it suggests an artist struggling with the language they have created and makes me intrigued as to where Okumura will go next.
