At first glance, this work may appear to depict an unassuming moment of everyday life — a woman wearing a hat among houseplants, welcoming the viewer in the bright sunlight. Yet if you strain your eyes trying to read her expression, you may find yourself unsettled by how little her masked face reveals. Moreover, as you approach the work — which stands roughly two meters tall — the degree of that vague, indistinct rendering only intensifies, and you will notice that the surface is covered by an accumulation of traces of color that catch off guard anyone expecting even a modestly naturalistic painting.
There was an artistic movement called Impressionism, which created images that emerged when the viewer maintained a certain distance from the work. In order to depict outdoor landscapes filled with bright light, the artists placed near-primary colors on the canvas with the intention of achieving optical mixing on the retina. However, their approach was sensory in nature, and there were artists who felt that it sacrificed structural integrity and gradually moved away from it.
In response, there were those who sought to systematize the technique more logically. Seurat, a leading figure among them, drew on the color theory of the French scientist Chevreul and other cutting-edge ideas of the time, sharpening the division of color still further and developing the technique of Pointillism — an accumulation of small dots intended to achieve even more refined mixing on the retina. The art that resulted, however, differed from the vibrancy characteristic of Impressionist works; it gave rise to an expression that also conveyed a quiet, classical dignity.
When I first saw the work of Tomohito Ishii, the first thing I felt was precisely that kind of strange stillness. Since his student days, Ishii had been painting from photographic images as his subject matter. There was an artist named Richter who painted photographs as motifs left within painting, but Ishii, by phenomenologically decomposing the photographic image and recognizing that it is constituted by a digital accumulation of dot-like units, has continued to work through a method of reconstructing that structure.
Ishii may be attempting to bring this reality into relief by analytically decoding the images that overflow our lives today. It is that penetrating artistic eye which has sublimated ordinary scenes into expressions capable of imbuing them with a sense of the sacred. Like the art Seurat arrived at by seeking the logic of painting in the external world, it may be a world brought forth by an act of symbolizing the ever-expanding electronic visual realm.
"Art Anatomy" Kyoto Shimbun