Manhattan Arts International
2002
Fassbender/Stevens Gallery

Michiko Itatani
by Claire Wolf Krantz

A long-standing theme in Michiko Itatani’s work is her negotiation of personal and socio/political contradictions and clashes. Her current show of paintings continues, in some works, to emphasize these contradictions, while in others a new impetus towards integration is beginning to emerge.

Itatani’s mixed cultural background and her sensitivity to the unresolved conflicts in the world around her underlie many of her artistic decisions. Born and reared in Japan, she moved to the United States as a young adult. The aesthetic and cultural inheritance from her formative years in Kyoto are reflected in her asymmetrical but balanced compositions and her use of somewhat flat, chromatically related color. This Japanese influence is a factor in the subtle, understated surfaces and the overlays of areas of intense feeling and forms that seldom integrate. By acquiring a sympathy with Western culture as an adult, Itatini’s work has become increasingly complex and fraught. As she has also shifted her interest from literature and a career in writing to that of painting, she has begun to include images related to the page in her paintings. This shift from East to West has never been complete or comfortable, however, and this gap between her Japanese soul and her American one is always tentative and shifting. Itatani has made a career of exploring these personal gaps and dissonances.

Itatani’s paintings typically contain dissonant elements skillfully and loosely held together as she balances unrelated sections of material. The most noticeable and beautiful elements are shapes containing raised, ruled, gray lines made by squeezing paint through a veterinarian’s syringe. Referring to the look of writing on a page, this correspondence is enhanced because the lined areas are shaped like pages irregularly stacked, even fanned out. The shapes float above a loosely painted allover ground that implies deep space. This sense of cosmic space is enhanced in some pieces by painted oblongs that imply a perspectival pathway leading deep into infinity. The collision of these crisply demarcated lined pages hovering over huge, open areas is unsettling.

This cacophony is most evident in Itatani’s practice of attaching to the expanse of her enormous pieces small, rectangular paintings that deliberately interrupt the flow and resolution of the whole. While her compositions have always functioned as though they had transparent layers sitting on top of one another, the viewer could always provisionally resolve the dissonantly painted and layered pieces because of Itatani’s strong sense of design and placement. However, the actual, attached canvases force the viewer to acknowledge the separation because there are physically raised planes that cannot be integrated into the whole. The result is uncomfortable, reflecting Itatani’s discomfort with the boundaries in her own life and in that of the world as she sees it.

However, her newest pieces are different in feeling and content, although some of her basic building blocks of patterned shapes and subdued color remain similar. America Blue, a series of five giant, spectacular paintings is hung in a gentle arc across one wall, giving a sense of moving through an integrated universe that is new in her oevre. The paintings still contain disparate sections that float above an amorphous atmosphere of air or water but the way they are painted suggests that they are a part of a complex whole, not separated from it. Patterned oblongs march their way into infinite depths. The tops of the paintings are pink half-circles, sensuous shapes that could be bodies but also suggest a pink sky, a sun reflecting and lighting up the earth. Below this, paint dripping from the glowing pink zone seems to be rain - a light, nurturing rain that alternates with the sun to nourish the earth. Page-like sections containing Itatani’s signature ruled lines float over a dark field scattered with brightly lit dots. A fascinating contrast is at work here. The bottom half of the paintings – the sections alluding to deep space – are black while the upper half is painted glowing shades of pink and red. For me, these allusions to the dichotomies of life and death, joy and pain, are fully integrated, as though Itatani has come to an acceptance that in the fullness of life, both factors are in play but are not necessarily in conflict. These paintings emanate a universe of hope and beauty that I have not seen in many years, creating a new beginning in her long, and fascinating career of making abstract art out of the elements of her life and her vision of the world.

Claire Wolf Krantz is an artist, freelance critic, and guest curator.
As an artist she works in a combination of painting and photography as well as digitally created images.