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Obsession and Automatism
Sleeping on dotty pumpkin pillows, Yayoi Kusama
A prayer can be heard, everyone stops for a second. Did it really start with “Dear Gourd?”.
A big light, lights and life. Dots and pumpkins. A child left to dream awake. The world undressing in front of her. Atoms and light, nothing else. Well, except for talking pumpkins, of course.
A Japanese movie many years later will see an Italian guy strolling on the wing of a flying aeroplane. He says “Be careful, this might be a dream, but you can still lose your head”.
Where is her head though? On the paper, in colours, all dotted.
Dots.
Dots.
Dots. And pumpkins, of course.
Hallucinations and Automatism have been inscribed in history as surreal. But they are real, real, just look at Kusama’s work.
More than pumpkins have come to and out from Yayoi’s mind. But the pumpkins, they talk in light. Like hearts of dragons, they seem to come from the ground and from the sky. They reveal to us the secrets the artist’s mind had discovered already. Long before.
