Year: 2022
Medium: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 112 x 194 cm (44 x 76 3/8 in.)
Acquired from Tomio Koyama Gallery, 2023
Colored light circulates among a multitude of disparate objects, producing an uncanny gradation. The excessive unconventional hues and scattered objects evoke the chaos of an overturned toy box. Yet Ito is a painter who is capable of discovering a miraculous balance within this disorder. At the center stands a mysterious creature with its arms crossed, enveloped in a complex red, orange, purple, and pink light. Judging by the title, might this figure be, for Ito, a being who presides over contemplation? Through the chance interplay of light and shadow, even its smirking expression and playful gesture come to resemble a wise thinker lost in thought.
When creating her paintings, Ito first constructs the scene as a diorama and photographs it from various angles. She then uses these photographs as preparatory drawings for her paintings, a process she calls “photo-drawing.” It is precisely in the difference between the eye and the camera that she discovers such miraculous balance. Viewed through the limited field of a camera’s viewfinder, the diorama reveals compositions that could not be reached with the naked eye, as though one had become small enough to enter the diorama world.
When the fantasies in Ito’s mind are brought into real space as dioramas, the camera, faithfully responsive to what is physically present, takes the place of her retina and accepts these unreal scenes as reality. Through the resulting photographs, Ito objectifies her fantasies and paints them as realities endowed with space and materiality.
