The Insho Domoto Fine Arts Museum 堂本印象美術館

One of the last works of the esthete DOMOTO, this Museum of Fine Arts invites you to travel. Conceived as the abstract image of a ship in 1966 by Insho himself, it evokes distant lands, with an architecture reminiscent of a certain Iberian city shaped by new art. From his first figurative works, tenderly bucolic, to his passion for cubism, the journey of his life absorbs visitors and guides through the meanders of creation. The first designer of patterns for traditional fabrics, he changes direction and turned towards painting, well after his twenties, and became known for his religious works, many of which line the ceilings of the largest Buddhist temples.

After the Pacific War, his art took the path of Western modernity. A fervent admirer of Pablo Picasso and Wassily Kandinsky, he borrows more intense colors from them while his features lose their precision to fade in front of the figures. The scenes are transposed in the West, sometimes in small French villages as taught by a few words written in the language of Moliere, and the characters claim the freedom to be and to think. However, they did not last long, and soon, DOMOTO Insho abandoned the figural in favor of abstract art, first leaving only room for unstructured buildings before letting his paintbrush float according to his desires, in black ink.

The last stopover leads to the very heart of her intimacy, the throws of dark colors on tissue paper imposing themselves with force, as if animated by a life of their own and seeming to symbolize the artist letting go of her time. The contrast between dull or even dark shades and the use of luminous backgrounds, sometimes even golden, gives free rein to the imagination of the observer to give meaning to the adrift...