Jacob Hashimoto. Path to the sky

From May 22 to September 30, 2025, the Fondazione Antico Ospedale Santa Maria della Scala presents the exhibition Jacob Hashimoto. Path to the Sky, curated by Raphaëlle Blanga, an expert in modern and contemporary art. Jacob Hashimoto’s installation will be created specifically for the architecture of the museum complex and will be a tribute to the city of Siena. Path to the Sky will guide visitors through the Corticella to the Strada Interna, along a path marked by a cascade of small kites symbolizing an illusory bridge between earth and sky, inviting viewers to raise their gaze toward a broader horizon. Hashimoto’s work resonates with the symbolic and physical essence of the space, once a shelter for pilgrims and still today a welcoming place for artists and visitors from around the world.

The exhibition, curated by Raphaëlle Blanga in collaboration with the Galleria Studio la Città, is produced and organized by the Fondazione Antico Ospedale Santa Maria della Scala with the support of Immagine Studi

Jacob Hashimoto’s Path to the Sky
Raphaëlle Blanga

Path to the Sky at Santa Maria della Scala is the result of crisscrossing trails and interconnections that came about thanks to the meeting of souls and the sharing of thoughts.

I was invited by the Mayor of Siena to come for a consultation regarding the programming of Contemporary Art at the Museum. Several among the countless spaces within the immense complex had been recently renovated. While there, I found myself immersed in the beauty of the exhibition dedicated to Fausto Melotti and Italo Calvino, an author inextricably linked to this place. Right from the start, I was enveloped in the mysticism of the historic building. So many individual features – the long corridors, the windows overlooking the Cathedral steps or the so called ‘corticella’, the frescoes decorating the entrance, and Sala the Pellegrinaio, which once welcomed the sick in a long line of metal beds – all exude a palpable spirituality. For over nine centuries, Santa Maria della Scala has been a focal point of Sienese life, a place steeped in history and stories that continue to resonate in the minds of the Sienese. Its rooms speak of many layers of history, like a narrative that never ceases to be alive.

Of all these spaces, one struck me in particular. Going downstairs, I found myself in the “corticella” and the “strada interna”, the “inner street”. Because of the connection between inside and outside, between sky and earth, both places create a profound dialogue between past and present. At that very moment, a spiritual metaphor surfaced: the place seemed to give new life to the people who had once passed through and temporarily inhabited it, for they had left imperceptible and intimate traces of their passage. Almost like invisible presences merging together in the mystery of those spaces.

This thought immediately called to mind the work of Jacob Hashimoto, whose artistic endeavor explores such interconnections between space and the individual. His dense showers of kites, handcrafted from Japanese paper and delicate bamboo frames interwoven with thin Dacron threads, seem to converse in a silent symphony with the architecture that houses them. His work engages visitors in an experience of human and spiritual interconnection, just as the walkways and spaces of Santa Maria della Scala seem to connect those who pass through them to something greater, to a transcendent dimension that stretches beyond the limits of time and space.

This intuitive connection with Jacob’s work happened to coincide with the themes dear to Cristiano Leone, President of the Santa Maria della Scala Ancient Hospital Foundation, as he looked ahead to the new program dedicated to Contemporary Art in dialogue with the spaces of the Museum, with the City and with the citizens of Siena.

Jacob accepted the Museum’s invitation to visit the site and imagine a new site-specific installation. There he chose the space of the ‘corticella’ and the ‘strada interna’ as his own. From that visit, the idea for Path to the Sky was born. “I was personally thinking about the Santa Maria della Scala as a portal between life and death and the path to the sky was this way marked through the wilderness of warrens and hospital passages leading to infinity...”

The word Path in English holds a meaning that encompasses both a physical and an abstract dimension: on the one hand, a tangible, well-defined path such as a road; on the other, a direction, a voyage, an ideal route chosen by the individual for his or her life. In addition to the physical and ideal dimensions, Path evokes a sense of journeying, a sensation that also emerges in Santa Maria della Scala as one traverses its halls, exploring the various layers of its past. History here is both coherent and complex, a passage that has witnessed the transformation of the building itself from a place of worship to a place of healing and hospitality, changing again until it became today’s space for art through a continuous evolutionary process that adapts and responds to the needs of each era.

These same feelings probably resonated with Jacob during his visit, for the meanings that permeate this place, both physically and symbolically, are the same as those that characterize his work. His art, in fact, is imbued with concrete and abstract pathways that connect the body, space and the spiritual dimension, creating a continuous dialogue between the individual and the surroundings, all in one continuous movement.

His landscapes are constructed from rows of small handmade kites layered in a grid, like small pixels in a photogram, or like an Excel table made up of small marks: a modern form of filigree. In these compositions, Jacob combines craftsmanship with digital programming, the traditional perception of landscape with a vision that is abstract and modern, calling to mind Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie, an abstraction of urban landscape where speed and noise are summed up in signs and geometries.

Jacob’s compositions invite each observer to create his or her own ideal path, one of thought and soul, through the physical and visual experience of the work. The pieces emanate a sense of manual labour, of intimate and personal time as well as the passage of historical time, that which belongs to the collective, that which unites us as a community of connected individuals, bound by the same land we occupy, the same fears and ultimately the same hopes.

And we living beings are bound together like Jacob’s little kites, one after the other, each in his or her own direction, connected nevertheless by a transparent thread, as transparent as it is ideal, in a whole that should ideally move the physical, ethical and moral worlds in the same direction, a harmonious whole, in which each part retains its own characteristics, like the kites that are different from one another, decorated with iconic images such as waves, clouds, grass or simple geometric signs. Jacob tells us that the whole is made up of the diverse, united in a common path, a virtuous fluid, embracing delicate passages in places created by the genius of humankind and visited by curious individuals in search of sensory participation.

The long pictorial cycle within the Sala del Pellegrinaio contains a fresco by Vecchietta, one of the most important artists in the transition from Gothic formalism to Renaissance naturalism in Siena. The allegorical work entitled Storia del Beato Sorore (History of the Blessed Sorore) depicts the legendary founder of the institution that was to become the largest hospital in the Middle Ages and probably the oldest in Europe, together with its gettatelli abandoned newborns, ideally welcomed by the Madonna at the top of a staircase.

In front of this majestic painting, I sensed a further connection with Jacob Hashimoto’s work, and I believe the same intuition led Jacob himself to conceive Path to the Sky.

The Blessed Sorore welcomed orphans into his foundation under the protection of the Virgin, offering them shelter and assistance. Similarly, Jacob Hashimoto celebrates these same values in his passage toward the sky, a work that welcomes the visitor with a spirit of generosity. Art, through its ability to inspire and generate reflection, becomes the ideal ladder to ascend towards salvation. Vasari remarked that Vecchietta’s works were “crafted with supreme grace and conducted with good practice.” Indeed, Vecchietta was a multifaceted artist who first worked as a goldsmith, then moved on to materials such as bronze and marble, and later devoted himself to fresco- and panel-painting. Perhaps a metaphor for Jacob’s work that crosses the artistic destiny of Lorenzo di Pietro in a modern key, moving from painting to sculpture, from manual to digital practice in a sublime and generous experience.

The life and work of Jacob Hashimoto are deeply linked to Italy, thanks to his association with Hélène de Franchis, founder of the Studio la Città in Verona. She saw Hashimoto’s work, a commissioned site specific installation, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Shortly afterwards they met by chance when Hashimoto, still at the beginning of his career, was working as a gallery assistant for an American art dealer, a friend of Hélène’s. Twenty-five years have passed since then, and Hashimoto continues to be represented in Italy exclusively by Studio la Città. It was at an exhibition at the Studio la Città that I had the good fortune to encounter his work for the first time, and then followed him in the numerous exhibitions organized by Hélène de Franchis in Verona, Venice, Rome and at the Bologna Fair where I saw the large installation Armada composed of countless small wooden boats. His work has never ceased to arouse astonishment in me and in all the observers I met on those occasions –astonishment arising from the elegance of execution, from its way of visually involving the viewer through simplicity and approachability, from the certainty that a profound meaning underlies the topicality and aesthetics of his art-making, which is solitary, original and complex yet at the same time immediately accessible for an observer who is emotionally open to the feeling of involvement aroused by the creation.

Jacob is an artist who lives his time to the full. With a mathematical outlook, he integrates new materials and digitization techniques into the evolution of his artistic research day after day, making his vocabulary and language ever more complex and current. These new tools combined with manual work and craftsmanship take shape in the polyurethane foam sculpture Waterblock, for example, and in canvas paintings such as Past the Haze of the Sun, which appear as Divisionist landscapes in a computerized key.

In his work, elements of nature such as landscape, water, waves, trees and clouds assume solid form, just as the spirituality intrinsic to each physical element takes shape.

Similar to the way Lucio Fontana implies a kind of personal diary of daily impressions in the inscriptions behind his Spatial Concepts, so Jacob compiles a list of phrases that he then mixes to compose the titles of his paintings They were already superstars and What has been all along, which today are displayed along the walls of the ‘strada interna’. These titles are not meant to be indications to decode the meaning of the painting, but rather verbal prods aimed at encouraging the viewer to traverse the work with his or her own emotions. “They intend to stimulate the viewer to engage their own imagination, their own personal narrative to craft meaning or questions through the juxtaposition of artwork and title.”

Grass, clouds, waves, made by collaging Japanese paper on small circles and rectangles, are the main iconic images that make up the wall works consisting of multiple layers of kites that overlap to create a dense and airy image of both landscape and abstraction. “I think the clouds and other recognizable images serve as a simple doorway into the vocabulary of the work.” The use of digital technology for the mathematical composition of the various layers allows the artist to work on the final rendition of the piece with greater precision, freeing up the time needed then to put the finishing touches on the entire handcrafted creation.

Jacob Hashimoto’s world is one of permanent dialogue between landscape and abstraction, between thought and form, between the craftsman and the technician, between the natural and the digital, between imagination and realization, between celestial and terrestrial environments, between human beings and their soul, between the individual and the collective. A world made of perpetual connections, never unrelated, but equidistant, fluctuating in intent and reality without ever surrendering to the yoke of the predominant idea.