Stars in the Night

With its hypnotic, tessellated surface of dark blues and purples, swaths of whites and crimsons, Stars in the Night is a captivating example of Yayoi Kusama’s lifelong meditation on infinity. The shimmering and sublime transcend all physical space through her obsessive, but delicate accumulation of marks. The canvas becomes a boundless realm, woven with semi-circles painted against a dark ground that stirs up imaginations of the enigmatic, infinite cosmos. Instead of the more common choice of the artist to paint repetitive pattern on a monochrome ground, this painting stands out exquisitely in its ever-changing palette, creating an opulent gradient pool of cool colors tinted with swirls of white and sparks of red. In the Stars in the Night, Kusama uses color as texture as she stains the surface with the mesmerizing ruby red and sapphire blue, resembling the act of absorption and immersion. Gracefully outlined rounded petals nestle into one another, recalling the form of cells that allude to the universe’s essence and lifeblood. They are regenerative matter, as they seem to grow and flow beyond the very edges and corners of the picture plane.

The accumulation of these forms creates an abstract pattern that generates an expansive surface that resembles works by Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. However, meant to be a defiance of the dominant Abstract Expressionist mode, with their all-over composition defined by large scale and expressive gesture, Kusama’s process is repetitive and, as a result, meditative. By repeating a single touch of brush tirelessly over time, Kusama weaves a net of pigment that expands in color and structure from one circle to infinity. As a result of a stream of consciousness, the mesmerizing canvas entrances the viewer in its duality, being minimalistic and excessive at the same time. As Kusama proclaimed, “At first glance, the canvases look like nothing at all - just plain field of abstract tones”, yet on closer inspection, ‘nothing at all’ revealed a vertiginous complexity, the effect of an endless regeneration (Y. Kusama, quoted in a press statement for Yayoi Kusama: White Infinity Nets exhibition at Victoria Miro, 2013, London).