“eikyō influencias japonesas” (『eikyō – Japanese Influence –』) 2019 Spring edition vol.33
Printed page

　Recently, in a magazine published in Spain on Japanese Culture “eikyō influencias japonesas” an article introducing Toshima Yasumasa was printed. (Japanese translation of the article is here）
　March of this year, Mr. Jaime Romero Leo, who studies in graduate school of University of Salamanca, visited our gallery and also to interview for the article. At that time, he came to Japan to study Japanese culture, and he was an intellectual young man demonstrating profound comprehension to the spiritual culture such as Zen.
　One of Toshima’s words, which this young man has taken up in the article was “Not halted in the details of real-things, but I am searching for the heaviness of real-things that reside in the nature. “The heaviness of real-things that reside in the nature“ ―― This exactly is the source of Toshima’s artworks that shakes and reveals the soul of the viewer, and sometimes making the viewer feel as if the spirit of the object emerges out from the picture. In other words, the nature and its life-energy, which Toshima devoted his whole life to exhaustively depict, possessed thus much of the heaviness. It seems to me that to challenge this “Heaviness” has a common factor with what Japanese Culture such as Zen and Tea Ceremony has challenged.

With Mr. Jaime Romero Leo (at Memorial Gallery of Toshima Yasumasa・Exhibition space)