BACK

Solo Exhibition at Galleria Chimera, Tokyo

Yasuko IBA is the artist who creates "pleats". The series of works dealing with plants' fibers (pleats) in the earlier stage of her career was varied to the works reproducing texture of a folded collar of a clean shirt or that of wool, then to the latest ones on which the degree of abstraction seemingly increased due to careful, but ambiguous depictions of the state of refraction of light on a glass with beer-like liquid in and tiers of foam up from that liquid forming on the brim of the glass.

She, born in 1967, majored in printmaking course at art college, had been working on plants by means of the silkscreen printing until the shift to the oil painting. After that, she began to employ a method of converting the photographic image into the painting. What is attempted by the artist there is not so-called the hyper-realistic flatness resulting from eliminating depth and focus. While the realistic image reproduced on canvas through skillful and competent touches drops a hint that it approaches to the hyper-realistic flatness, it turns around and forms some focus-like thing. In other words, there emerges an out-of-focus, a vague spot in the center of the realistically reproduced image. That is to say "pleats" - undulations of the flat. Through utilizing the photographic flatness, the artist spontaneously accepts the flatness of the painting and resolves on exploring inside it. There, as Gilles DELEUZE holds in his "Leibniz and the Baroque" that a new form of transportation shall be required between the internal spontaneity and the external limitation, a new form - pleats is required to connect the internal with the external. Folding the external over the internal - plants, cloths and light over the internal of the painting. And there will be found the out-of-focus, slack, distorted and multiple-power jostling demarcation = outline.
She is not the artist who paints a substance, but the one brings an unsubstantial form, in a word, "pleats" into existence through folding the substance.

Takashi KITAKOJI