Conscripted as a kamikaze pilot in 1943, Kenji Yoshida escaped certain death following Japan’s sudden surrender in the aftermath of the atomic bombings of August, 1945. Turning to painting to recover from his experiences of the war Yoshida, then aged forty, moved to Paris to concentrate on his art, in 1964. There, he joined Stanley Hayter’s legendary Atelier 17, where he refined his considerable skills as a print-maker. Subsequently, he developed his signature style: canvases covered by exquisitely balanced forms in oils overlain with gold, silver, copper and other metallic appliqué shapes all deployed in an abstract, Modernist aesthetic. Intensely conscious of the miracle of his own survival and of the fragility of life, he repeatedly used the single title of Life for the majority of his later canvases.

La Vie (KY105) shows golden orbs rising harmoniously together upon a matte black background. Various qualities of gold leaf and paint have been used to flood the canvas with light. The “aged gold” of the central orb uses the traditional Japanese method of overlaying gold-leaf squares on an underlayer of lacquer, whereby the overlapping lines of intersections between contiguous squares provides the added emphasis of an irregular patterning. Yoshida’s Japanese title of Inochi was translated into French as La Vie, and quite simply means Life – in all its splendour – in English.