REVIEWS

Press Release

Hiromasa Ishii fashions phantasmagoric, postmodern folk art built from patterned textile backgrounds and subject matter sampled from legendary painters, infamous paintings and artistic movements. Suggestions of synthetic cubism and the graphic Nabis group intersect with characters and scenarios evoking the work of Schiele and Van Gogh, amongst others. Born in Ashikaga, Japan, Ishii exhibits throughout New York and California and states of his artistic inspiration, "I had discovered the mutual relations between the world and myself not by language and action, but by the form and color. According to Freud, 'The dream is a realization of suppressed desire.' That is to say the dream is a reality. And therefore the reality is a dream. I paint human[s] who exist between their consciousness as a reflection of the outward. I am especially influenced [by] a form of 17~19th century Japanese art which is called ukiyo-e (picture of floating world). Each Picture is like a game of card in 'Life,' on the stage called earth." Meticulously crafted, these works are visual wonders with arresting, contrasting imagery crashing against its elements and building a coherent, striking whole-at once reminiscent of both video games and conceptual, postmodern