Mariane Ibrahim is pleased to announce the second solo exhibition of Japanese artist Yukimasa Ida, “Now is Gone.. Maintenant n’est plus”. The show will be on view in Paris from October 15 to November 26, 2022.
Yukimasa Ida reconnoiters the borders between the abstract, the representational, and the natural. Now is Gone is a spiritual invocation of time, for and from the future, a continuation of work from his Chicago exhibition, Here and Now, which rivalled the cycle of life and death.
In exploration of “instances” the artist aligns three styles to guide the viewer through the gallery space, with a focus on abstract, figuration and sculptural work. Colorful epiphanies of animals, humans, and nature guide the body of work, and the energies emitted. The artist is moved by continued sequences of existence and events that occur in an irrevocable succession from the past, through the present, into the future. In Japan, time is often related to nature, the cyclical notion of time through the passing of seasons, also innate in Japanese poetry and literature.
Each animal in Japanese culture is sacred, conveying powerful significance and appearing in various forms as important motifs, which in the culture many represent a year based on Jupiter’s orbit—the planet takes nearly twelve earth years to circumnavigate the sun. The symbolic animals represented in this body of work include the pig, horse and bull, which are representative of stability, conquest and the nature to dominate.
The new ephemeral works focus on how time is an ever adapting and changing construct. People and their existence in time, past and present; only in the reflection of culture and history. Space and time are the framework within which the mind is constrained, therein to construct its experience of reality.
This exhibition also marks the continuation of his ‘End of today’ series, representing how his work, and therefore himself, has expanded due to recent events or understandings. The works are enigmatic, a retreat into a contemplation, giving a nostalgic feeling of what once was. The faces are blurred almost vanishing which mirror time passing, and the thick fleetly brushstrokes allow a shift of clarity depending on the (distance) one is standing from the work.
Yukimasa Ida shares, “The theme is a visual concept of time, both the beginning of something new, and an accumulation of what I have experienced, fragments of my life from what I have seen, imagined, created. Everything diminishes the moment something new is born, which is the most significant context of time. In the process of this inevitable ending, the future is born.”
