Kyoko Idetsu at Nonaka-Hill

Kyoko Idetsu’s paintings at Nonaka-Hill have a charming way about them. Figurative and representational while also dream-like and loose, the works present various scenes — snippets from the artist’s day-to-day life. The press release for the exhibition cheekily describes this as “anecdotal expressionism, a school of painting limited to herself.” Writing directly on the gallery wall accompanies a handful of works, giving context to the scenes presented. Some paintings are memories or stories of people Idetsu has come across — like the montage of a factory worker friend who Idetsu writes “was praised at his job for very smart job catching the mochi as it came out of the machine.”

Some works feel like overheads, like the painting of the mother who got frustrated with her son at school pickup, only to ride away on her bike alone. Others feel intimately personal, while still banal, like the painting of the artist’s dinner, a rice bowl and salad plate that are floating on an impossibly large hand — “Make it. Eat it. Clean it up,” she writes matter of factly. 

Yet amidst this playful story-telling, one wall of the gallery contains small darkly-colored paintings that picture the horrors of human existence. A family member sitting next to a loved one on a sick bed; a mother in a hijab holding a limp child — in all of these scenes, tears stream down her subjects’ faces. The inclusion of these works grounds the exhibition — amidst the little narratives of our daily lives, war, illness, and sadness are a near-constant backdrop. Still, Idetsu invites us to slow down, and mull over the daily confluences in our own lived reality. 

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Photo: Kyoko Idetsu at Nonaka-Hill. Image courtesy of Nonaka-Hill. Photo: Paul Salveson.