For nearly a decade now, Japanese artist Yasuyuki Ito has been adapting to a drastic loss of central vision, resulting in spectacular compositions often organized around central shapes and spaces surrounded by brilliant light. The canvases are neither abstract nor precisely figurative; many feature landscape elements surrounded by symbolic environments, while others evoke brightly lit stained glass. Ito matches this mixing of imagery with radical variations in texture by applying areas of paint in prickly expressionist clumps alongside smoothed fields of color.
His figurative landscapes in particular gain evocative textures from the ridges he includes in his paint, while the bold, abstract and vaguely floral elements are rendered in a smooth hand that complements their elegance. Above all, however, Ito’s paintings articulate an unbending optimism, with passages through mountains, walls and even mirrors promising glowing utopian vistas ahead. Appropriately for a visionary artist whose sight is impaired, Ito crafts powerful images that demand not only to be looked at, but seen into.