Yukiko Suto "Field Exhibition"

Take Ninagawa just opened a new exhibition of large scale panels by Yukiko Sato. Each of the four images, done in a combination of pencil and oil on gesso-covered panels took months to produce, and Sato's effort can only be properly appreciated through a close examination of these meticulously rendered landscapes. The paintings originate in photographs taken by the artist, but little of the ease and informality we associate with nature remains in the final product, the aestheticized version of the landscapes. Sato's visual recollections—every blade of grass, every flower bud, every little rock rendered in a hyper-realist way—render live nature symbolic. The works, for the most part monochrome, owning to the the dominant graphite of the pencil, are punctuated with matte blotches of color which appears to float upon the surface of the support. It is as if we are witnessing a transformation of an embodied landscape into an imagined one: colors and lines fading away, blankness of the panel seeping through and finally taking over. 

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Roadside Garden 2, 2010, detail. Oil,pencil and plaster on camvas mounted on panel, 130.3 x 194 cm.

 The exhibition will run through November 27.

VOCA 2010: The Vision of Contemporary Art

Beginning in 1994, a group of Japanese curators and art critics put together an annual exhibition of about three dozen young emerging artists whom they want to spotlight. The exhibition, now hosted by the Ueno Royal Museum, is accompanied by a bilingual catalogue where these curators and critics introduce their nominees in short essays. Because the participants must be selected from among many whom the nominator believes to have a particular promise this exhibition is very selective: after all, each of the people who endorse have to put their art-critical weight behind just one contemporary artist. This year's VOCA opens February 14 and will run through the end of the month. The webpage for the event appears to be in Japanese only, so you might want to note the address of the venue (Ueno Royal Museum): 1-2 Ueno Park, Taito-ku.