The pulsing portraits of Yukimasa Ida
Alan Pocaro describes Yukimasa Ida’s Flaming Memory as a show charged with urgency and raw vitality. Channeling the energy of de Kooning and the persistence of Auerbach, Ida treats paint as a volatile force, creating portraits that churn, flicker, and collapse between abstraction and form. Fiery reds and acrid yellows radiate heat, while fleeting glimpses of faces and gestures appear only to dissolve, embodying a precarious instability that resists the clarity demanded by our algorithmic age.
The canvases openly bear their histories—knife slashes, dense impasto, and scarred textures recalling modernist traditions. Yet rather than reading as cliché, Ida’s forceful mark-making becomes a meditation on memory and fragility. Through this unrepentant physicality, his work asserts the imperfect and vulnerable dimensions of human life, reaffirming what remains irreducibly human and beyond the reach of digital systems.
