Year: 2014
Medium: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 145.5 x 89.4 cm (57 1/4 x 35 1/4 in.)
Acquired from SBI Art Auction, 2024
This work is truly reminiscent of a traditional “sansuiga” landscape painting. While Imazu’s characteristically fluid brushstrokes significantly disrupt the colors and forms, the trees, birds, and rock surfaces—fragmented but retaining a sense of figuration—certainly suggest the painting of a magnificent mountain landscape. Imazu uses image-editing software to form composites of images gathered from the internet and adds painted elements to create a preliminary sketch. However much the artist’s brushstrokes may appear improvised, they are already fully mapped out at the planning stage. Imazu’s remarkable talent lies not only in the high level of skill needed to render her digitally produced sketches as oil paintings precisely but also in the way that she deconstructs the image, which is evident in those sketches. Based on the title of this work, it must be a collection of many mountain landscapes. However, the combination of multiple images has distorted much of the composition as though by a landslide, resulting in an extremely complex non-figurative image. Accordingly, the foreground could be described as almost abstract expressionist, with Imazu’s keen eye mediating this process of abstraction. The fact that every viewer of this painting would, in some way, think of a mountain landscape demonstrates that Imazu has depicted the mountain in a typified form, abstracted from a collection of mountain images. Her eye presents a painterly vision from two directions: both the abstraction and the typification of composite images.
