Momoko Sudo: The silence of the landscape
Written by Eduard Reboll
Translated to English by Barbara Rivera
Zen, a branch of Buddhism instructed by Bodhidharma, took possession of the arts in Japan in the form of mysticism in all that is related to nature: from the construction of objects to the organization of a home, or in something as simple as the tea ceremony, or in the architecture of the haiku. A special sensibility at the time of projecting a line, and a serene look at the abstraction of the landscape are two of the characteristics that distinguish the work of Momoko. The result is a piece full of lyricism and spirituality that continues the tradition without forgetting a new perspective, with a reference to the interior landscape.
The line is the graphic element where the body of an idea comes forth. We utilize it to describe the pain or the joy of the environs, to interpret the direction of a mark and to fix its limit on the paper. In figurative art, its voice is certain and finite. In abstraction, it can flow and not necessarily have a beginning and an end. It can come or pose, appear or simply escape slowly. It can unite in others of its kind, and for example constitute a shadow on the piece. This is how the lines are organized in Momoko’s work. Her concept parts from a meditation over some interior landscape that is not defined, and that is becoming concrete as the union of such lines is established. As she opens them, the light of the gardens expand; when they come together, the sinuous produces relief that, if seen from an altitude, they look like the dunes from a seismographer’s paper. Dunes viewed from an airplane as if Saint Exupery was describing them. Furrows of a rake. Fine sand from a beach. Undulated and humid lines that the waves leave behind as they return to the ocean.
The night, as if the hand of a girl who was drawing it, is also present in many of the works' backgrounds. Sometimes black and mild, others in pale blue over the mark. Lucio Fontana seems to captivate her when in some of her surfaces a sinuous opening appears in the middle of her piece. The darkness then takes possession of us and the attention is directed toward the unknown. Nevertheless, her insinuation is not cruel or incisive as the one from the Italian-Argentinean master, but more that it functions as a grotto or a curtain that tie to sensuality more than to enigma.
Nevertheless, if there is a debtor in her line of work, it is Jesus Soto, although I would not be inclined to talk about op art in her work, but about a close minimalism to the poetics of silence. More than the game with spatial geometry that elevated this Venezuelan artist for his visual effects and the participation of the spectator in his work, the Euclidian geometry seems to motivate Momoko when she analyzes the bi-tri-dimensional effects on the picture plane. She does not go into the formal superimposing, but into the calming effect that produces the union of this delicate and subtle sign, which is called the line.
The beauty of nothingness can appear in the proper silence that emanates from a glance into the sinuous stillness of a thread. The weave, disunited with the same serenity as if it deals with its own hand, creates a horizon of dunes that expand and contracts along an imaginary frame. There is no contour line because it is the sum of them that will configure the idea. In a way, they are not marks, since there is barely a variation in the intensity or thickness of the line. They are a fountain of graphemes that according to their course, they delicately curve to accentuate a knoll or they tenderly open to suggest a turn toward the bottom of a ground.
Then concept of decoration has had bad luck in the scope of criticism since the separation between art and craftsmanship appeared. Nevertheless, the school of Bauhaus tried to unite both so that the former would be the source of the latter. Momoko’s pieces/works are warm, kinetic, and apt for daylight and nocturne light.
If you have to define her poetically in a few words, I would not discard
the words: rivers, serenity of leaves, road, white verses, light, grooves
of a garden, or simply, a painting of the course of air. Perhaps the same
air that she shakes in her surroundings every time that on her working
surface, a rain of lines originates that conform into a landscape.
