Interview with María Octavio

M - María Octavio, K - Kanako Noda

M-. When were you drawn into the art world?

K- I started painting while I was a student in Osaka University in Japan. It is a very conservative society, and students come under heavy pressure to find a "normal" job at a reputable company soon after university, but I knew that wasn't for me. So, instead of starting a normal, boring "good girl" career, I decided to go study art in Italy. Nobody in my family, or my neighborhood, had ever gone to live abroad.

After 9 months of learning to speak Italian in Perugia, I moved to Bologna and enrolled in the Beaux Arts Academy (Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna). The first year was very tough, because I had to learn everything from scratch: art history, contemporary artists' works, and art techniques. I took nude drawing for the first time in my life there. I enjoyed it all, but I understood right away that traditional techniques are useful but not crucial to artists today.

Many of my professors in Bologna were from the generation following the Arte Povera movement, and what they taught us was not so much how to paint, but how to think in the context of art, how to find yoiur own artistic voice. As I did that and learned how to think about and how to see art for myself, I realized I was fully immersed in the art world. There is no going back.

M- Where and when did you learn the art technique of rice paper?

K- I learned this technique indirectly from my two mentors, the two Davids.

The first is Italian painter Davide Benati. I'd been experimenting with various kind of paper, when Benati, who was my professor of artistic drawing at the Accademia, gave me a big stack of the Nepalese rice paper he has made his signature material. This was a great honor, and a great opportunity. He gave me so much paper that I could experiment many different techniques with it. Gradually, I learned how to treat this very thin and delicate paper with watery acrylic medium. There was a lot of trial an error: at the beginning I had a series of disasters, it seemed so fragile, so hard to work with. But after some years of practice, I learned all its secrets. Now I can handle it without problem.

The other mentor is British artist David Tremlett. I had the fortune to work as his assistant on several projects. David does mostly site-specific wall drawings that meld themselves with their space. It was a real education to assist him, his is a great talent. I was inspired by the way he dealt with space, the way he exploited the possibility of pigment colors, and how he used masking tape as drawing materials.

Of course, my specific technique is my own, developed after hundreds and hundreds of trials in my studio. I wanted to re-invent masking tape: to take an industrial product designed to be temporary and turn it into an artisanal material meant to last. While industrial masking tape is totally flat and uniform in color, I wanted to give my paper strips a much more organic feel, with the pigments spread unevenly in a way that let the structure of the paper's own fibers come through. I wanted to make masking tape come alive in a lasting way, and I've spent years gradually altering the processes to make it just right.

M- Relate your looking of the home out of the homeland. How has this process been? Why do you need to create a home out of your country?

K- It's only when I left Japan, I discovered how much I was Japanese deep down. At the beginning, it was important to identify myself as Japanese and to position myself in the context of Japanese culture. Over time, I became more skeptical about it. Is Japanese culture really something that can belong to me? Isn't it that I feel so because I live far from Japan?

I grew up in a suburb of Kyoto. It was a small, newly built satellite town, where people go just to sleep at night. We were free from all the stifling local bonds of the older, more established villages, but we were also excluded from more traditional culture. It was the kind of deracinated suburb that grew fast in the 1970s and 1980s, during our economic boom, and in a way it was as far away from "tourist post card Japan" as you can imagine. So many local Japanese traditions were exotic to me for long time. Deep Japanese customs never felt mine, they felt other.

Coming abroad, I realized how far my experiences were from those Westerners expected of me. It is the 21st century now, but the myth of the exotic orient is alive and well. I refuse to inhabit the kind of exotic stereotype people often want to put me in. And yet, I can't deny that my language, my manners, my instincts and my way of behaving are all deeply Japanese. This is maybe why I felt compelled to take a quintessentially Japanese material - rice paper - and do something totally un-traditional with it.

M- How does your art work relate with your personality? I see your work silent, minimal, continuous, repetitive.

K- "Silent" is a word that comes back again and again when people describe my work. I find that gratifying. I don't believe in self-expression: in that self-indulgent interpretation of art as an outlet to gratify the ego by exhibiting it.

When I went to Italy and met many people from different cultures, especially from Europe, I was surprised at how eloquent they all were, both in a positive and a negative sense. They were verbally impressive and have often strong characters, strong opinions, something to say about every question. But this style of communication - which, surely, is very Italian - never really felt like home to to me. The more emotive and eagerer to convince me they were and more arguments they gave me, the less I was convinced.

So to find an alternative way of communication, and also to protect myself from their effusiveness, I chose strategically to remain silent. Many people say that I'm very silent and patient, and I always feel that they’re implying that "I'm like that because I'm Japanese and Japanese culture is like that". But I don't believe that. It isn't that I'm Japanese, it's that I'm revolting against, pushing back against this hyper-verbal assault, this sense that everything can be said with words.

I don't believe the artist's job is self-expression. What great artists do isn't talk, it's to listen to others, to the space and the materials, then follow what all the elements tell you to do. You are only an agent to execute the project and nothing else. I know it's romantic vision but I still love the anecdote about Michelangelo saying that he doesn't make the statue, he frees the statue from the chunk of marble.

M- Tell me about your show in Caracas, what are you presenting. Describe the work we will see in this show with your own words.

K- I'm going to present series of works on plastered wooden panels, called "small walls". I started this project of colored rice paper on plaster base, originally doing wall drawings which are direct, site-specific interventions on walls. These "small walls" are a kind of extension of this wall drawing technique - because by the time you've put gesso on it, the wooden board has become, in effect, a miniature wall.

My artistic research uses painting as a starting point, but my concern is always to go beyond traditional painting formats, beyond the framed bidimentional image. Today we live in the world brimming full of bidimentional images. You can find any kind of image just with Google. What I want to show is not the image, but a thing itself. To me, painting is no longer about an image you can consume digitally, but something like a fetish, an amulet. Today, painting must have a physical presence and a physical power.

So the texture or feeling of the material in painting is more and more important. I found this importance when I saw a series of Mondrian's paintings on wood. They had minimal and clean image but the feeling of the material gave them a rough and gritty impressions when you saw them close up.

This is the effect I'm hoping for: that thrill in the presence of the thing. This is one reason that I refuse to accept the edge of the panel as a demarcation line, a place where the drawing must stop. I want everyone to understand: the work is the object, not the image.

M- Explain what you mean by drawing with paper instead of drawing on paper. I understand the basic difference but I presume there is something more to it.

K- To me, paper is always something more than just a base to draw or write on it. In Japan, people make windows, sliding doors, a folding screen, and many goods for daily use out of paper: even slippers! In my drawings, paper strips are the drawing, not the support for the drawing - actually, the support is gesso. So I wanted to reinvent paper, to subvert our expectations of what paper can do, to transform it from medium to message, to shift it from background to foreground.

M- How is your creative process? You start drawing a sketch of what you are going to pursue or you make rice paper work and then compose your pieces. I feel there is an arquitectural approach on your work. A planning, a previous drawing process then the realization of each piece comes after the reflection an perfection of the project.

K- First I make rough sketches. It's not even a project, just simple drawings and scribbles of ideas. Free play. Meanwhile I read books and search information online to look for ideas, too. Recently I've taken to reading art history books, especially about the 16th to 17th centuries, for inspiration.

I spend more than half of the process doing this type of research. Sometimes it takes months to pick up an idea. Then, when I decide what to do, I make small drawings using colored masking tapes on a notebook. I tinker, tinker, tinker. When I start to get close to a design that speaks to me, I sometimes transfer the drawings onto a wall with masking tape to see how it works on a larger scale. Then, finally, I start to prepare the support of gesso and coloring rice paper with pigments for paintings. Usually, before I start the final works, I prepare precise sketches, a kind of blueprint for the projects.

M- Do you read poetry? If you do, who do you read?

K- I like to read Haiku poetry in general. Its simplicity and realism inspires me a lot. In my works I'm aiming at a poetics that is neither lyrical nor epic, but objective and materialistic, like Haiku. The Haiku must follow strict rules, however, that formal limitation allows the artworks unlimited potential for creativity.

2011