To make gold rise. This was the challenge that Boston-born painter Makoto Fujimura set before himself. Gold being the most complicated of materials, simultaneously associated with wealth and spirituality, but also with purity, permanence and sovereignty. Its inherent weight lends gravity to Medieval manuscripts, authority to the king’s crown, and lavishness to classic Japanese art. It has always been used in religious art, adding “the weight of divinity.”

With this in mind, Fujimura has used the material as a metaphor for art itself, and allows the gold to become light, to rise to bring hope.

Completed over the course of five years, the centrepiece of the show-also entitled Golden Fire-is the culmination of his acclaimed Water Flames series. He spent 18 months layering the gold, five layers over the lower corners of the painting.

Fujimura uses the Medieval Japanese technique of Nihonga painting, whereby metals and ground minerals are applied directly to Kumohada paper, the largest, strongest paper in the world. There are no acrylics or oils here, but hand-ground pigments applied via an organic animal hide glue, nikawa.

“The materials I use,” Fujimura explains, “are mostly derived from the medieval methods of Japan, they lend themselves to the subtle intersection between abstraction and representation hidden behind the four basic elements: Water, Earth, Air and Fire. Pulverized precious minerals, gifts from the earth, are layered with water onto Japanese mulberry and hemp fibers, creating a semi-permanent surface. The prismatic semi-opaque layers trap light, creating refraction of light for the eyes to delight in. Paper breathes, accommodating itself to the environment, and thus continues to mold itself to the surroundings, and that process is captured by the watermarks on the surface. The surface itself is an ecosystem of colors combining earth with air, and water with, in this new series, fire.

The exhibit also contains the recent video and installation, “Mercy Seat Portraits” created for this summer’s The City of London Festival with Yoko Ono and others.