Takako Yamaguchi. Eight Artworks 2009 / 2021

About

To understand a work of art, three questions might be asked of the artist: Where does it come from? How does it work? What does it mean? So when presented with these questions about the works on view in her new show “Takako Yamaguchi: Eight Artworks 2009 / 2021,” the artist has, happily, answers for all three:

Where does it come from?
In 2009 Yamaguchi began a series of photorealistic paintings executed in oil on canvas. The paintings derived from photographs commissioned from Matthew Brandt of a nude model posed to re-enact, however loosely, images figuring prominently in the history of modernist photography. Yamaguchi’s paintings were completed in 2010 and exhibited at the end of that year.

How does it work?
Twelve years later Yamaguchi returned to these paintings with the idea of “redeploying” them—much like artists’ models are themselves deployed and redeployed, posed and re-posed—as part of a new and different series of artworks. To this end, her paintings were then boxed in two kinds of brightly colored plexiglass—a fluorescent pink and a yellow-green—which profoundly changed the experience of these hand painted artifacts, now “trapped in amber,” so to speak.

What does it mean?
Yamaguchi admits to a fondness for gimmicks, particularly when, as here, the gimmick involves setting the industrial into tension with the artisanal; the “quick and easy” (outsourced plexiglass boxes) into tension with the “painfully slow” (exactingly executed photorealistic paintings). Her clever idea proves, however, to be more a starting point than a finish, for each of the resulting artworks generates up a startling richness and visual complexity that, when experienced directly, is far greater than the sum of its component parts.