tomie ohtake

Tomie Ohtake: At her fingertips

I. Color cutouts

Between the 1950s and 1960s, Tomie Ohtake’s first venture into abstract painting became known for its “blind” character; infused with an intense, spontaneous, and informal quality, which often relied on brushstrokes made, literally, with her eyes shut.

Soon after that, in the first half of the 1960s, Ohtake’s paintings condensed into more evident shapes, as the artist began to favor compositions where figure and background are clearly distinct. These figures resemble simple geometric shapes, but their outlines flicker as if torn with the tips of the fingers. Few people are aware that this is not a mere illusion. At that point in time, the artist began to produce studies using color paper from magazines which were hand-torn. The process was Ohtake’s way of dealing with the instantaneity of gesture and infusing the entire painting process with chance and control.

The compositions Tomie Ohtake identified in these minute collages worked as “scripts” for paintings and engravings that experimented with different scales and chromatic combinations. It was as if the clipboard that held her paper cutouts was a mining site for shapes and color combinations.

In the 1970s, as her paintings began to depict clear-cut forms, her studies also changed, and the artist started to use scissors—with neither ruler nor stiletto—to cut paper. The compositions grew denser, the whiteness (the blank sheet) encroached by areas of color, occasionally suggesting landscapes. Surprisingly, the texture in the paintings often emerges from the collage itself, appropriated from different photographic materials. The color palette also expands, as it faces chromaticism during an era that flirted with psychedelia.

Ohtake relied consistently and recurrently on collage studies until the mid-1980s, when her painting gradually adopted an atmospheric quality as she embraced acrylic paint, following studies in small-scale paintings.

II. Direct painting

The first written mention of Tomie Ohtake’s collage studies dates from 1982, in the article “Tomie Ohtake: à procura da essência da arte,”[1] by Miguel Chaia, published in the seventh edition of Arte em São Paulo magazine. In that occasion, the researcher interpreted her reliance on torn and cut paper similarly to the way we do it now, as a way to imbue an initial idea with an element of chance, juxtaposing reason with the organic gesture.

Furthermore, he provided a clue as to why this material is yet to be recognized as a critical element to understanding this artist’s abstract output. Chaia wrote that Tomie Ohtake does “direct painting,” i.e., painting that does not veer off into any aspect other than the intrinsic properties of painting: composition, color, materiality, the frame, pictorial spatiality, and so forth. Any other meaning or reading has always been left up to the audience: Ohtake would leave her works untitled, and whenever someone would tell her they’d found figuration in her pictures (a mountain, a planet, a body), she would thank them kindly, never denying or confirming the perception at hand.

Hence, it is understandable that she would approach her collage studies as behind-the-scenes information. It wasn’t something she’d conceal; after all, she supplied illustrations for Chaia’s article, and in the following year, the publication released in connection with her exhibition at Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) featured photographs by Ricardo Ohtake that showed her handling said studies. Since she would always focus on the finished painting, Ohtake did not say much about her process, neither did she allow these materials to become wholly lost: she kept some of them pasted onto the pages of a notebook and agreed to show them in one of her centennial exhibits (Influxo das Formas, Instituto Tomie Ohtake, 2013, curated by Agnaldo Farias and Paulo Miyada).

Paying close attention to the artist’s studies is, currently, a way to tap into the ingenuity with which she approached planning and unpredictability in her pictorial practice—without denying the direct character of her painting. As a result, some of the recurrent polarities in the understanding of Brazilian painting from that period, such as the dichotomous polarization between geometric calculation and expressive gesture, can be elaborated anew, when considering Ohtake a landmark of invention and freedom.

III. Beyond the opposite of reason

The historiographical practice has a penchant for manifestos since it is hard to evade the rapture brought by slogans collectively agreed upon and made available to future historians. Even in art, where an inevitable distance is known to exist between what one says and does, the allurement works, and, over time, it poses challenges to reconstituting some of the past tensions.

Such is the case with abstract art experimentation in postwar Brazil. The discourse-oriented, aggregation-driven character of the concrete manifestos tends to seduce historical readings, which never fail to mention them while showing resistance or disinterest in attempting a deeper understanding of the informal abstractions that were unquestionably present in the local scenario, though distributed across less cohesive networks. As a result, the role of informalisms in our historiography tends to be one of alterity or of a backdrop to accounts of how national constructivist avant-gardes emerged and became established.

It so happens that, although it encompassed artists as diverse as Manabu Mabe and Antonio Bandeira, informal abstraction should not be regarded merely as the opposite of the progressive, rationalistic, cosmopolitan rhetoric of Brazilian constructivist projects. Firstly, because informal abstraction was a cosmopolitan trend, attuned to the international mindset that was largely disillusioned with the horizons of the avant-gardist utopias of the first half of the 20th century and interested in other epistemes and spellings. Secondly, because the drive for nonfigurative, nongeometric form is not only a denial of reason and logic but also a willingness to tap into some subjective spontaneity channeled by the creative gesture. This is especially relevant in Brazil since surrealism was not widespread; the task of enhancing the notions of spasm and improvisation fell to the informalisms. 

In this broader context, Tomie Ohtake even identified herself with informal abstraction, especially at the time of the “blind paintings” mentioned earlier—when she was closer to the second generation of Grupo Seibi. Those were the only years of strict informalism in her work since she would soon veer into researching unmistakable, planned-out forms, despite their tenuous outlines. Even at that point, it is paradoxical to note the vast discrepancies between how gesture would be approached by Ohtake (luminous layers), Mabe (calligraphy) and Flávio-Shiró (pictorial mass); and it is worth noting that at that time she drew closer to critic Mário Pedrosa and artists Willys de Castro and Hércules Barsotti, who were closely connected to neoconcretism.

At any rate, Ohtake’s relationship with informal abstraction—despite never having been a wholehearted, “card-carrying” subscription—deserves consideration for having connected the entirety of her output with the quest for some extemporaneous gesturality. 

The process even permeated paintings that seemingly follow concrete compositional principles. The use of cutouts and collages made with the tips of the fingers (either bare fingers or with scissors) resulted in a process that deemed her art simultaneously somewhat analytical and somewhat subject to chance. It is a solution that restricts the sudden explosion of form to a single step in the creative process—the stage in which paper is torn or cut, which may take seconds or minutes. All subsequent stages can be defined as an unrelenting pursuit and unique recombination of the composition outlined therein. 

IV. Discoveries and legacy 

In the paintings and engravings that constitute the core of this exhibition, one will find a wide array of compositions and solutions that involved Tomie Ohtake’s collages. In some of them, the similarity with what one sees in the colors, shapes, and textures of paper is impactful. In others, one can intuit the processes of experimental rearrangement of colors and proportions that the artist would carry out in developing canvases and prints. The very shifting back and forth between painting and engraving can be understood as such: a flux of shapes continuously improved with each new shift.

Assembled, these artworks—which span decades of production—constitute indications of restless pictorial thinking. Two aspects of that thinking deserve special attention, in addition to the processual element emphasized herein.

The first aspect is the breadth of the color range explored by the artist and the ease with which she proposes combinations of areas of color. There are no taboos: dim ochres are game, as are vibrant tertiary colors, so luminous they seem fluorescent. Tomie Ohtake was a one-of-a-kind colorist, and the 1970s was her boldest phase in this regard. Compared with the relatively narrow scope of her generation’s chromatic repertoire, Tomie Ohtake stands out as a trailblazer who left a legacy of disruptive precedents to the generations that followed. 

The second aspect is the subtle play of shapes that takes place between artworks from that period, brought about by the concatenation of curves and straight lines in an assortment of undulations. At first glance, this may seem like a cohesive field with limited variations, but what Tomie Ohtake did was to intensely vary the relationship between the curve and the edges of the pictorial frame. Thus, the canvas might behave as a landscape or a lens, the outline of a body, or the schematic description of an obelisk. Point and field. Phallus and vagina. Landmark and chasm. These are spatial archetypes—rather than figurations—achieved through the formal arrangement of color fields. As a result, Tomie Ohtake also left us a legacy of invaluable reflection regarding the pictorial dynamism and the spatiality of abstract painting.

In the aforementioned article, Miguel Chaia relates this compositional work with photography and cinema. The parallel is due to the subtle suggestions of scale, framing, and movement perceived in these artworks as a whole. By approaching the importance of the collages as a creative process, one might also reinforce the notion of montage, of the arbitrary juxtaposition of elements from different origins that comprise a whole, with a new image spatiality. Thus, they would be paintings and engravings informed by the montage of color, handled with the tips of the artist’s fingers, and experienced by the perceptual body of the viewer.

V. To look anew

When new facts present themselves to historians, past hypotheses must be revised, but do not always turn obsolete—not least because, while in effect, these readings interfere with the construction of reality. The concern of Tomie Ohtake’s collage studies provides novel ways of approaching her commitment to abstract art. In this way, the artist emerges freer from the negotiation between concrete and informal art, and closer to the wish to broaden the creative field through interactions with the imaging raw material of her time. The notion of gesture also emerges further from the imaginary of brushstroke authenticity and closer to an abandonment to chance that justifies the comparison with Zen philosophy. Thus, we can look anew at Tomie Ohtake and find an artist at once earthier and more spiritual than the one we used to see.