Painting and cooking came to Yamaoka's life by intuition
“Because reason annihilates and the entire imagination integrates or totalizes; reason alone kills and imagination is what gives life . (…) . Reason, the head, tells us: nothing! the imagination, the heart, tells us: everything!, and between nothing and everything, merging everything and nothing in us, we live in God, who is everything, and God lives in us, that without Him we are nothing.”
**Miguel de Unamuno, On the tragic feeling of life (1912)**
In 1969 so many things happened that euphoria, vertigo and nausea are confused.
Kiyoshi Yamaoka
Richard Nixon took office as president. The riots of stone wall furiously radiated the dignity of the collective LGBTQ. Frank He appointed Juan Carlos de Borbón as his successor. The Manson Family sealed the hippie twilight with blood and summoned an entourage of morbid fascination. **LSD swept through Woodstock** like a shiver of delight and hope. The apollo 11 reached the lunar surface (initiating, without knowing it, a juicy conspiracy tradition) . The Braves sang 'Love and Sympathy' with brilliant melancholy...
Y Kiyoshi Yamaoka he took a ship that took him from Yokohama to Siberia. From there he began a long (and clueless) trip through Europe on trains that he never knew what time he should catch, because everyone ended up throwing it at 00:00 at night in the main capitals. In Stockholm he fell in love with a Spanish woman who was selling apples in a market. Sign that he took as a kind voluptuous oracle.
** Madrid received him with several epiphanies **. One, the brown color of the twilight sky. Another, the incidence of the sun and shadow, and the metaphysical meanings of what is revealed brightly and what remains hidden in the shadows. And another one (not the last), the appearance of Antonio Gades tapping in the early morning of fresh streets with hoses.
He vividly remembered that scene. The Tarantos (Francisco Rovira Beleta, 1963), his favorite movie while he returned from a good flamenco party in The Corral of the Moorish , crossing Bailén street between the jets of water from the dumpsters.
Kiyoshi rummages through his dilapidated warehouse for works from his past.
A year later, in 1970 , witnessed in shock on the news the Suicide of the great Japanese writer Yukio Mishima through the ritual of seppuku . The first harakiri which has been going on since the end of World War II.
In Japan, Yamaoka had played baseball for three years at the request of his brother to try to pay off family debts. Fed up, he decided to quit and try your luck as a photographer . And he managed to become ** a disciple of Takashi Kijima **, a benchmark of Japanese commercial photography of the 50s and 60s.
But Spain called him por bulerías, por soleá, **ay el garrotín de Carmen Amaya ** … And he was also hypnotized by the absorbing darkness of the “Spanish black painting” , surgeries of the soul of Tàpies and the arpilleras, almost shrouds, of Look at them . He decided to leave for Spain with the only certainty of instinct and the hunger that he has dreamed of something that he has not yet discovered.
In 1972 he entered the Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando . Two years later, the Tokyo Bungei Shinju Gallery organized the first exhibition of him. In 1986 it was the turn of the prestigious **Ueda Gallery (Tokyo)**: well connected with the New York market.
At 78, Yamaoka has the ruddy face of a wild child.
A friend, an artist who lives in El Escorial, told her: “Mountain, I invite you to eat” _ (affectionate nickname for his last name:) _. Y Yamaoka decided to stay in that village at the foot of the Sierra de Guadarrama , garnished by the vestiges of Philip II. He found a house and a huge studio.
in the late eighties his work had already found space in New York's Soho Thanks to the Vorpal Gallery.
He worked with stapled lead plates like war meat that doesn't finish healing; ash birds that look at the sky in the last breath; hundreds of yashiro [社] or “little houses of God” (as he calls them) where souls rest after his pilgrimage, many of them silhouettes with nails; he built a road for mishima with thousands of shrapnel …
'Two men in Manhattan', a work from Yamaoka's New York stage, from the late 1980s
Yet she still couldn't put a name to the anguish that coursed through her stomach and floated between her ribs. Until he discovered Unamuno. and then it appeared Silver Big Apple (the big silver apple) .
The Japanese concept that he had been bouncing around inside her suddenly took on a liberating connotation : shisho [ ]. “In the dictionary it says that the translation into Spanish is an idea… But it's not exactly philosophy either. I understood the meaning of my art when I read Unamuno. His anguish was my anguish ”.
In 1997 he signs a contract with the Edurne Gallery in Madrid , founded in 1964 by Margarita de Lucas and Antonio Navascues : pioneers of contemporary art in Spain. And he would end up exhibiting at ARCO in 1998 and 2000.
to their 78 years Yamaoka has the ruddy face of a wild child. He tells us his intricate journey on a visit to the basement of his house, where he stores more than 1,000 works (many never exhibited).
Red tuna tataki from Tavern Yamaoka
His home is a warm skeleton; sober and confused . And he continues narrating his life, between amusing analepses, while we taste various dishes in Yamaoka Tavern _(Calle las Pozas, 31, San Lorenzo del Escorial) _: an indescribable open secret in the Royal Site.
His link with the restoration is another of those coincidences that make his life a feast for the curious . But we could summarize it in survival.
He offers tasty and homemade dishes with a slight Japanese influence under what he himself defines as Yamaoka style : Mellow gyūdon with shiitake sauce; Tuna tataki; salad of sprouts, shrimp, sesame and tobiko (flying fish roe)... And the dish that he assures us has marked a before and after in the success of his establishment, “Yamaoka Avocado” : a luck of warm shari-based salad (rice in preparation for sushi) and layers of wakame seaweed, avocado and marinated tuna tartare.
Was he looking for the Unamuno flavor?
A table at the Yamaoka Tavern. On the wall you can read the lyrics of the Japanese children's song 'Nanatsu no ko', by Nagayo Motoori & Ujo Noguchi, 1921