Stars

Glimmering in gold and galactic blue, Stars (1990) by Yayoi Kusama transports the viewer through time and space and into a feeling of weightless flotation. Against its iridescent background, Kusama’s sea of golden circles swells and undulates, the rings of colour expanding and contracting in size as they crowd across the painting; meanwhile, darker areas of midnight blue occupy the centre of the frame, like immense nebulae floating through space at impossible distance, only barely registered by the human eye. Though clearly related to the artist’s ‘infinity net’ paintings, Kusama’s use of discrete circles and multiple background tones differentiates Stars from the contiguous, interconnected tendrils of colour that define those works; where each form in the infinity net is part of a larger totalised pattern, here every ring possesses its own individual autonomy, set aside from both the fields of blue behind it and the other circles which surround it. The effect is of an especially heightened sense of depth and distance, even as it maintains Kusama’s characteristically flat surface of pattern; indeed, the painting almost verges on figuration, with its night-sky blue, darkened clouds of tone and sparkling loops of light illuminating the canvas offering, at the least, a kind of symbolic interpretation of the expanse of space above our heads. For Kusama, an artist profoundly concerned with notions of endlessness, infinity and their representation in art, there is something poetically apt in her vision of the stars. Discussing the initial hallucinations that would go on to inspire her paintings, Kusama has said that she envisioned vast nets of patterns subsuming everything in sight: ‘This endless repetition caused a kind of dizzy, empty, hypnotic feeling… My net grew beyond myself and beyond the canvas I was covering with them. They began to cover the walls, the ceiling, and finally the whole universe’ (Y. Kusama quoted in L. Hoptman, A. Tatehata, U. Kultermann, Yayoi Kusama, London, 2000, p. 103). Yet in Stars, Kusama reminds us that the universe we stare up at each night is already covered in ‘infinity nets’ – an expanse of endlessness, distant and enormous, which we see reduced to a web of simple patterns in the sky.