The Tokyo-based artist Toshio Ishikawa’s small-scale canvases combine several painting traditions with intriguing and spectacular results. Most of his oil compositions set stunningly detailed photorealistic still lifes in the foreground, against impressionist-style landscapes that appear cracked and frayed like a trompe l’oeil on an ancient wall. Nautical motifs recur, including seascapes and spiral shells, but so do more ambiguous objects like hourglasses and grapes.
Ishikawa describes his work as surrealism, a fitting categorization since the startling juxtapositions of perspectives, settings and subjects in his paintings are nothing if not dreamlike, and the items he portrays seem to have been collected from some subconscious repository of symbolic objects. Adding to the delicately detailed oil compositions’ unreal atmosphere, his paintings always feature a dominant tone — generally blue or green — that lends his enigmatic images a nostalgic, otherworldly tint. Space, time and perception become thrillingly unhinged. Without prescribing a specific way of seeing them, Ishikawa invites us to find meaning in his exquisitely fine dream visions.