Year: 2008
Medium: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 162.1 × 112.1 cm (63 7/8 × 44 1/8 in.)
Acquired from SBI Art Auction, 2023
Imazu began her style of producing oil paintings based on sketches combining images gathered from the internet around 2005, and this work comes from relatively early in her career. It depicts what appears to be an aerial view of a nocturnal cityscape, with eleven figures mysteriously holding hands to form a ring that is superimposed. This is exactly the seemingly outlandish juxtaposition of imagery that exemplifies Imazu’s distinctive approach. While it seems that the artist’s current works achieved a precise control of even the finer nuances from the drafting stage, in her earlier works, she gave herself the freedom to deviate from the initial plan as she painted. The light of the night scene shimmers like flowing liquid, giving the sense that Imazu’s painterly imagination is at work here rather than mere photographic replication.
The center of the ring of figures floating in space aligns with the vanishing point, from which the city lights radiate outward. The boundary between the night sky and the city cuts horizontally across the painting’s focal point. The eye is inevitably drawn to this single point of emptiness. This point emphasizes the spatial “height” of the painting, leading our gaze to the sky above, far beyond the scale of human beings. The more our eyes attune to the spatiality of the painting, the more a strange sense of elation wells up within us, alongside a feeling of anxiety.
