Karen Shiozawa and the Images That Emerge Beyond the Visible

“My work begins with painting, yet it extends into space, light, music, and sensation.” Karen Shiozawa’s words open the door to a universe where the image is never merely a surface but an immersive realm that holds memory, perception, and dream. It is here, in the shifting boundary between what is seen and what is sensed, that her artistic research takes shape. Shiozawa constructs poetic worlds through layered spatiality and a refined use of chiaroscuro, where light and shadow become emotional material even before they become pictorial matter. Her scenes, often infused with echoes of European architecture, emerge like memories filtered through time: windmills, arches, and spires transformed into symbols of an inner landscape rather than depictions of the real. Her process is meticulous - tapped layers of paint, scratched grounds, stippled touches of light - techniques that generate suspended atmospheres, almost resonant in tone. Painting becomes a perceptual device: Shiozawa invites viewers into an inner form of listening, a sensory passage where imagination and reality merge. Her works seek what lies beyond the visible, giving shape to that fragile zone where emotion becomes image, and image becomes experience.