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Email PageIndelible Ephemerality
April 3, 2008- May 4, 2008
Reception: April 3, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Yoriko Inakazu
hpgrp gallery
32-36 Little West 12th Street: 32 W 12th St Yoriko Inakazu Untitled (2007) |
Yoriko's Inakazu's paintings on paper put us at a remove in one sense while plunging us into an irrevocable sense of the present as well. This detachment and deep introspection suggests a somehow and a somewhere that are hidden as well as within sight, a fusion of exteriorized and interiorized vision. These paradoxical conditions seem embedded within a realm of gentle grace and serene simplicity that is redolent of a feeling of tranquil aloneness. The upshot of it all is that we are engaged with an energetics which offers us an entry-point into perception which recreates an aesthetic experience that points to Inakazu's own experience and yet which is removed from it as well.
The artist's vision appears to call forth into consciousness a recognition that intrinsic to all phenomenon are hidden depths that can only be alluded to, attended to or anticipated and never actually realized or made manifest. Ultimately what makes this artist's aesthetic contribution so exquisite in its approach and ambition is her allusion to the state of impermanence and transience that course through her work. This interior and anterior oscillation of presencing and removal, an unknown quality felt in a most concrete way, becomes manifest as sensation through the artist's nuanced painterly touch and compositional control. As viewers we connect with the work through an intricate aestheticized experience in which we re-create the moment of liminality – the charged threshold for change – that Inakazu embodies through her forms.
In hope1 and hope2, for example the artist sensorially arouses us with the image of Chinese peonies that seem to be on the verge of being washed away, submerged within the flow of currents of icy grey waters. Simultaneously a dramatic possibility of retrieval and revival presents itself: the fleeting floral bouquet seems to rematerialize out of the watery depths, reasserting itself outside of the impending darkness of the swirls of water.
In a scroll work such as firefly, Inakazu achieves a striking balance between concretization of form using an exquisite control of her brush marks to insinuate a feathery flow of leaves, perhaps bamboo leaves that seem to wash downward from the top right of the scroll. It is imbedded in and emerges out of a sensation of fragmentation and atomization. The artist has created a field of vision that seems interrupted by particulate matter which is radiantly filled with specks of gold: a raiment of filtered light interrupting a surge of darkened potentiality.
In several of her untitled works as well, Inakazu brings us to the brink of chaos through her coloration, mark making and suggested contours referring to oxidation and decomposition while keeping such suggestions in abeyance by a deft application of gold leaf and marvelous flicks of her brush to insinuate the radiant life force of plants, blooming flowers, and the glints of the rays of the sun striking gentle eddies and currents of water. It is this unanticipated implication of life forces confronting death forces in her work that offers us insights into the quality of the artist's frame of mind and spirit.
Her work is meticulously constructed so as to seem effortlessly and endlessly sustainable in its interplay between transparency and opacities, between a wearing down of geometric and organic energies and between a radiant coming into presence quality and sense of tragic impasse as well. In this regard, Inakazu's work can be said to be subject to a double-movement of invocation and evocation. By this I mean that there appears to be a deeply imbedded sense of interiority, of the hidden, of flux in her work. Yet we also encounter a core of quietude, a soft quality of harmonious play in the work as well.
A summoning up of eternal forces surges through each of the artist's works, an invocation of animistic forces that is nature itself permeates her work. There is a saturated and compressed aspect to the work which suggests a re-awakening of sensations, feelings and responses that the artist perhaps herself is responding to while immersing herself in the activity of making form become manifest through her brushstrokes and application of her mineral pigments.
There is intense pleasure in experiencing the paintings of Yoriko Inakazu. I have alluded to the fact that they are expertly calibrated artworks in the sense that the artist's heightened sensitivity to compositional organization and nuanced coloristic mark making creates a highly intensified visual drama. Yet I hope I have made it clear that there is something more than this obvious sensitivity to materials that pervades the artist's work. This certain something undeniably transcends high technical skill. It brings the artist's high procedural competence into the space of the numinous and the charismatic. It is this quotient of extraordinary mindfulness which to my mind raises the work and brings it into the order of high cultural achievement.
Through her work we as viewers are placed in a condition that suspends time while placing us directly into the flow of presentness. This encounter with and through duality is the central visual event that holds our attention and that connects us with each of Inazaku's artworks. Sensations of immanence and rapture, both, are at the core of each work. These artworks are quite giving and gracious in terms of their spaciousness (even sumptuousness) yet what I find particularly persuasive is a palpable decorum and reserve that adds a bracing note of intractability, steeliness, to the artist's aesthetic project.
What I have attempted to describe is work that is multi-leveled and beguilingly complex and it is hard to restrain one's sense of admiration at how comprehensive Inakazu's intentionalities appear to be. The artist's energies are embedded in genuine arousal of admixtures of feelings and thoughts all pertaining to what might be termed liminal experience. Her work offers us an intersection of mood and vitality, a middle place that is neither here nor there, this way or that, a middle space where transition and a change of direction and temperature surges with possibility.
The artist's paintings are deep visual pleasures because while they are obviously formal devices on one level they are not merely felt depictions of nature. They are more importantly conveyers of the artist's relation to her encounters with nature's fleeting attributes. Through her surface structures, colorations and sense of touch, Inakazu insinuates the simultaneous becoming and the perishing of substance and materiality. The artist's private world is one where what is being explored are transitional times and spaces: crossroads and thresholds, dawn and dusk, frightening and boring and frustrating and exhilarating sensations seem to bubble up all at once through her work. Yoriko Inakazu's paintings remain in the mind's eye long after we are no longer in their presence as objects. Her achievement is the creation of indelible material and psychical imprints which secure for us, somehow, a tangible sense of the ephemeral.
------------------------------------------------------------------- Dominique Nahas is an independent curator and critic based in Manhattan. He is Associate Professor at Pratt Institute where he teaches critical studies; he is also a critique faculty member of the New York Studio Program. He is currently the 2007-8 Critic-in-Residence at the Hoffberger Graduate School at Maryland Institute College of Art. A former museum curator and director Mr. Nahas' writings have appeared in numerous art magazines including Art in America, Art News, Sculpture, Trans, Art On Paper, Paris Photo, Hand Papermaking, Artnet Worldwide, Chelsea Arts, Review and d'Art International. His most recent co-curated exhibition (with Margaret Evangeline) "Empires and Environments" opened at Brandeis University's Rose Art Museum in January of this year.
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hpgrp gallery was last updated: 2008-10-15
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