This is the third edition of a program the gallery has been running since last year to introduce emerging artists. In one of its rooms, four works by Tomohito Ishii held their own in productive tension.
One painting hangs on each of the white walls of the well-composed space. One depicts cherry blossoms and sky adorning a densely overgrown copse of trees. The other renders vivid colors running horizontally and vertically — something between halation and noise — with lively urgency, evoking not so much depth as an outward expansiveness. Though they differ in size, these two works form a diptych of sorts, and on closer inspection one can see that they are two visual interpretations of the same subject.
That is to say, the former was made with the intention of faithfully reproducing a photograph the artist himself had taken. Its brushwork is thin and smooth, with countless colors interwoven to create an atmosphere of quiet solemnity. This work was painted as a means for Ishii to understand how he himself perceives the world. With each individual mark, he becomes acutely aware of the very act of "painting" and "seeing." Through being bound to reality, the artist reflects on his own mode of existence in the world.
The latter, then, is concerned with the question of how he expresses the world. Here, clean vertical and horizontal strokes layer upon one another, and the colors moving between them reconstruct the subject according to a different set of criteria from the work described above. The subject, rendered with precision in the former, is here twisted and distorted — further internalizing private emotion — and the surface appears frozen under the sheer weight of its informational density.
Together, then, this diptych presents two sides of the same coin: his perception of what lies inside and outside himself. This can also be gleaned from the title he gives these works: "Signal." The word is apparently used in the sense of "data in a computer," but signal surely means not only such electrical waveforms but also the impulse that prompts the act of painting itself. The work as a sign capable of bridging self and other. In this way, his works go beyond even the original intent of painting, teaching us something about what it means for us to perceive the world.
"Gallery Reviews" Bijutsu Techo,