MAKOTO FUJIMURA: GOLDEN FIRE
Sara Tecchia Roma

You could not ask for a lovelier introduction to contemporary Nihonga painting than this exhibition by Boston-born Makoto Fujimura. He marries ancient Japanese techniques with the impulses of abstract expressionism. Insistent on beauty as the constituent purpose of art, he pushes a rich tradition outward toward the ineffable.

Mr. Fujimura earned his M.F.A. at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts in 1989 and studied — a first for a Westerner — in its doctorate program devoted to timehonored Japanese methods. In 1992, he became the youngest artist ever to have work acquired by Tokyo’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

A form of watercolor painting dating back to medieval Japan, Nihonga is popular among contemporary Japanese artists attentive to the beauty of materials. Organic rock pigments are washed onto handmade papers. Pigments are ground from natural minerals, shells, corals, and even semiprecious stones. Applied with glue, Nihonga has properties similar to casein, one of the first binders used by man.

“Golden Fire” (2006), the exhibition centerpiece, is a splendid panorama of gold leaf that breaks to uncover traces of color both under the leaf and scumbled over it. Exceedingly thin, Japanese leaf requires multiple tiers to fully cover pigmented ground. Variation in the number of layers changes the amount of light reflected from the surface. Fastidiously applied, the contours of each successive layer create a subtle grid that alternately exposes and conceals underlying pigment. Glimmerings of color emerge from a golden mist.

The painting is flanked on side walls by sheets of black-dyed Kumohada paper (a large, strong Japanese rag paper) skimmed with gold and platinum powders. Called “Anselm’s Fire,” these sheets are a muted version of black thangas painting, a Buddhist art in which light forms billow out of translucent darks. Mr. Fujimura’s panels, more matte than their thangas models, serve mainly to absorb light, thereby emphasizing the luminosity of the gilded works.

Skip the video installation “Mercy Seat Portraits” (2006). This is conceptual boilerplate, the artist’s shrine to himself as a bicultural sage. Stay with the paintings. The secondary gallery is resplendent with three pieces from 2005. The calm of “Water Flame Azurite,” its successive veils of blue flecked with silver, is transporting. “Water Flame Silver” is a radiant, contemplative field of silver leaf spintered by a joyous spray of granular whites. “Water Flame Gold” is a small song in blue and gold. All three fulfull Mr. Fujimura’s stated desire—similar to that of an icon painter—to convey a sense of transcendence by means of color and light.

-Maureen Mullarkey

Until January 13 (529 W. 20th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-741-2900).

KATSUMI WATANABE: GANGS OF KABUKICHO
Andrew Roth Gallery

The Japanese have stopped having sex. Durex, the condom company, did a survey last year and the Japanese ranked last among the 41 countries rated in the frequency of sex: The average Japanese person had sex just 45 times a year. (America ranked no. 11 at 113 times a year.) At least the low-life types that Katsumi Watanabe photographed in the 1960s and ’70s, which are now on display in “Gangs of Kabukicho” at the Andrew Roth Gallery, still knew how to get their ashes hauled: They looked to commercial relationships.

Kabukicho was a section of the Shinjuku area of Tokyo given over to illegal prostitution (it was legal elsewhere), dives, gambling joints, etc. Watanabe (1941–2006) made his living roaming around at night with a camera equipped with a strobe, taking pictures he sold to the subjects: three pictures for 200 yen. The whores, the thuggish Yakuza, the bartenders, and their trade all presented themselves to the brilliant light of his flash after first arranging themselves in the poses they wanted immortalized. It seems to me these pictures are as much about class as they are about sex, about lowend fantasy and cultural longing as about libido, about cut-rate despair as about whoopee.

The 50-odd pictures on display are all black and white and untitled. Many show packs of young men, the typical group being four, out for the night. One bunch are all in snappy black suits, pointy shoes, and dark aviator glasses. The four hunker down at an intersection with the white stripes of the crosswalks forming a backdrop. Another group posed at a bar are dressed like American teenagers. One wears a plain white T-shirt, one a white football jersey with a large number 42 on the front, another a white turtleneck, and the fourth a white vest and a cowboy hat.

The rest of the pictures are mostly of women. Roger Scruton, the British philosopher, wrote recently about prostitution that, “Sex and contempt are adjacent regions in the psyche of the typical client; and a prostitute must willingly accept that she is being spat upon.” The women smile wanly. Some dress as twobit geishas, or as dyed blonde Caucasians, or as hip chicks. When they are naked they show their bodies awkwardly, without the practiced stances of professional models. And it is all so sad.

-William Meyers

Until December 22 (160A E. 70th St., between Lexington and Third avenues, 212-717-9067).

APRÈS NOUS, LE DÉLUGE
Francis M. Naumann Fine Art

“Après Nous, Le Déluge” resists easy characterization as much as the Sèvres porcelain that motivated it. Painter Don Joint asked 16 artists to respond to “A Taste of Opulence,” the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s current exhibition of its Sèvres collection. This lively show is both a jam session between artists and an actual sale of Sèvres pieces in the rear showroom.

If Sèvres provided conspicuous consumables for Louis XV’s era, gallery products fill that bill today. There is an engaging inevitability, then, about this pairing of paintings and porcelains. While some artists curtsy more than others to the theme, all remain very much themselves.

Pride of place goes to Douglas Vogel’s “Does This Mean Anything?” (1975/2006). A found terra-cotta head, coiffed in 18thcentury style, lies on its side to suggest decapitation. Marie Antoinette after the guillotine or a cloaked reference to beheadings closer to us in time? Equal parts warning and Duchampian frivolity, it carries the frisson of execution. In a waggish way, so do Eileen Foti’s miniatures of doomed aristocracy, painted on Frenchfry containers and laid out on the watered silk of casket interiors.

Cindy Sherman’s bouillabaisse tureen, “Madame de Pompadour (née Poisson),” created in 1990, is good fun. Ms. Sherman appears as Madame (born Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson) around the exterior of a tureen painted inside with gorgeous fish.

Susanna Coffey’s characteristic mug shot is the scaffolding for delicious, porcelain-like tones set against a celestial blue background. Her modus operandi is perfectly suited to this kind of tongue-incheek enterprise.

Don Joint’s “Nécessitaire” (2006), painted on small marble tondis, extracts winsome curves and color combinations from Sèvres handles and contours. Ro Lohin’s lively “La Vie en Rose” evokes the stippling of particular Sèvres techniques.

Evelyn Twitchell is an inventive abstract painter whose work deserves wider exposure. It was a pleasure to find included her darksome “Evening Tree” (2006). Trevor Winkfield’s “Sèvres Corset Bouquet” (2006) is a riff on the stasis of decorative forms; it infuses them with a calculated disenchantment. Deborah Rosenthal’s richly impastoed “Symmetria” (2006) observes the theme with sensuous, delineated forms that summon analogies between the lines of vases and the female body.

Mario Naves’s lovely collage gives little quarter to the theme beyond an enveloping calm that derives from the dominance of blues that hold textural excitement in check. By contrast, Randy Stoltzfus’s panel painting, dappled with gold leaf, is an unfeigned homage to the motif.

-Maureen Mullarkey

Until December 22 (22 E. 80th St., between Madison and Fifth avenues, 212-472-6800).