- Venue
- I-MYU Projects
- Location
- London
Yuko Nasu paints portraits. Her subjects are imagined, ambiguous, and anonymous, inspired by faces she’s seen in the street and photographs from newspapers and magazines including missing people, criminals, politicians, models, and pop stars. The aptly titled exhibition ‘Detective’, at I-MYU Projects, marks the steady recognition that her work has received over the last three years including being selected for New Contemporaries (2006), Jerwood Contemporary Painters (2008), and the Jerwood Drawing Prize (2009).
Nasu uses bold, swirling brush strokes in oil on canvas and paper, but has a lightness of touch, layering the paint to create the effect of hazy, mummified faces. Francis Bacon and Marlene Dumas have been noted as obvious influences, but the key concept here is that of muddled identity – we so often nearly recognise her subjects, but not quite (can we see Boris Johnson? Lily Allen? Jim Morrison?). A grid of fifteen works on paper pinned to the wall evokes a bank of mug shots or passport photos; one pitch-black face stands out from the colourful crowd. The subjects’ eyes in their large, rounded sockets are often reduced to eerie pinpoints.
On two larger canvases, big curves of diluted paint create faces that are foetus-shaped, and blurred, as though the viewer is rushing past. The central of three very small canvases in a row is evocative of Munch’s ‘The Scream’; the works on either side are portraits also but only just -one resembles a blonde wig and the other is more like a light bulb.
Having developed these ‘imaginary portraits’ over the last few years, Nasu is presenting her first stab at abstraction in this exhibition, for the final two large canvases barely represent heads. The colours are a departure too – whereas her previous palette has been diverse and at times positively fluorescent, these paintings looks as though they’ve been made with river mud; the colours are earthy browns, golds and beiges and the brush used larger, with drips and dribbles of paint. For the artist, these works are a new step in terms of exploring the limits of what is recognisable as a face. Nasu acknowledges the importance of moving forward with her painting but will always return to her portraits to, as she puts it, ‘get refreshed’.
There is something disturbing at work beneath the surface in these pictures -so many of the melting faces and forms are nearly nightmarish. Nasu is enjoying living and working in London; in her native Hiroshima, tastes leans towards ‘conventional and cute’, and the Japanese media doesn’t provide such a wealth of subject matter, ‘but here’, she says, ‘people are much more open minded’. Cute, her paintings are not; the unsettling, abstracted portraits are a promising hint of what’s to come.
Yuko Nasu will be showing in the Project Space for I-MYU Projects at the London Art Fair, Business Design Centre, Islington, 13 -17 January 2010.
