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Yoko Mitsuyuki
   Main Gallery and Small Works Gallery May 24 - June 18, 2008
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Yoko Mitsuyuki

For several years now large rounded shapes have dominated the paintings of Yoko Mitsuyuki, swelling and at times almost pulsating within the boundaries of the canvas. They are variously (and at times literally) like a heart, a primitive head, an apple or some other ripe fruit, and clearly they have some deep personal resonance for the artist. For the viewer or critic steeped in Western art history, they recall the playful biomorphic shapes of the German-French painter and sculptor Jean Arp, but Mitsuyuki comes out of a different tradition, and there is something decidedly Asian about her use of color and pattern. She has written of the influence of the natural beauty of her hometown, Yanagawa, in the southern part of Japan. Could the patterns of stripes at the perimeter of her works be a memory of the city’s canals? Do the dreamy blues summon up the waterways of this famously charming place? It’s probably best not to get too literal-minded and to accept the paintings for what they are: masterful juxtapositions of line, color, and shape that can evoke a range of moods, from the gently comic character of Autumn to the exuberance of Soar, which might conjure up a flock of birds or a school of fish floating lazily through some undefined space.

Several of the works in this show mark transitions for the artist. Tree still deploys the familiar rounded shapes of her earlier paintings, but the surface is now fragmented into almost Cubist shapes, and her palette is nearly monochromatic. In the series of paintings on paper called “Memory,” Misuyuki reveals a dreamily spontaneous side of her talents—they are offhand and unforced, as though she were free-associating in two dimensions. Wave of Blue and Blink of Blue signal a new direction entirely. The first is an exuberant burst of stormy romanticism that may put some in mind of German or American expressionism in the first half of the 20th century. The second, realized in the same limited range of tone and color, has a more tightly controlled structure. As the artist remarks in her statement, the color blue in so many of these works holds important significance for her: “The glorious blue of nature herself touches my heartstrings.”

The joy for her audience—what touches our hearts—lies in seeing a talented painter stretch her wings and take off into unfamiliar but promising terrain.

Ann Landi
Ann Landi is a contributing editor of ARTnews
and the author of the Schirmer Encyclopedia of Art.