What is regarding and depicting Sobye?

 by Ichiro Hariu   The personal exhibition of Reinhardt Sobye in Toho Gallery, Tokyo is counted as the third time in June 1996. 1 have written already, originally I received a letter from a Norwegian painter unknown for me, including photographs of his paintings, asking about any gallery in Tokyo to organize his personal exhibition, and the owner of Toho Gallery, after investigating these photos, agreed to organize his exhibition as an alarm bell to Japan, because there is no such penetrating realistic painter in Japan. Although the former twice exhibitions of Sobye in Toho Gallery had not so many audiences as exhibitions of master pieces in museums and departmentstores, they has gotten great reputations and echoes among artists and reviews on newspapers and art magazines, and all of his exhibited works has been sold out, as we expected.
just after his first exhibition here, the owner of the gallery and I planed to visit Norway to meet Sobye, but our travelplan has been canceled caused on disease of the owner's family, therefore none of us didn't yet meet the artist directly. However, I know through his fax about some changes in Sobye's life since last year. One of them is that he divorced his wife. I don't know why, but she was the model of a portrait titled "The Image of Ingun" which was sent from him for his first exhibition, and according to him, by usual custom of divorce in Norway, the men must give the house and car to the women and pay much money to her as compensation and expenses for nursing of children. As its result after wandering several places, it seems that he settled down at a public collective house for artists in another town. In spite of such conditions, he continues energic works, and another change is that he won a domestic major prize of arts recently, so Norwegian art critics began to write monograph of Reinhardt Sobye competitively.
Indeed, looking at his new works sent from him for this time exhibition, our fear that he could not concentrate on his works by the instability of his life, swept away completely. Furthermore, the owner of Toho Gallery decided to make cata logues with all colour prints of his paintings, murmuring "works of this time is probably the best", after investigating into details of the paintings. There are portraits including refuges from wars, elderlies, and the artist's self-portraits, and landscapes including farms, people's houses and ruined houses abandoned and laid waste by the "developments" of the contemporary civilization. But both groupe of his works exposes shadows of the death and symptoms of the catastrophe of civilizations as inevitable truth,. I understood vaguely the reason why Sobye gave the title "Civil War" for the third exhibition in Japan.
However, when arrived the artist's own text titled exactly "Civil War" for the catalogue, his real intention became very clear without any doubt. What he calls "Civil War" is not only ethnic conflicts like Bosnia, Rwanda and Tchetchen etc., but also the hostile, omitting and annihilating tendencies of economical development-suprematism against social weaklings and minorities as outsiders, which are proceeding internationally even behind ethnic conflicts.
This text fully realizes to us that even in a human face and an unattractive landscape of countryside, we can find out one scene of the world history which symbolized the crisis of total human beings, and that the core of artistic impression is not at all skill of technics, but the deepness of such thoughts and visions. Of course on the other hand, any thought and vision of painters should be realized consequently into visible details of their paintings, the capacities of artists must be proofed in these points above all. I hope as much as possible of Japanese audience to witness these points strictly and deeply in this Sobye's exhibition.