Yoichiro Yoda

NowHere is pleased to present the exhibition The Crossing with recent artworks by a New York based Japanese painter Yoichiro Yoda.

Yoichiro Yoda is an artist who is driven by fixations and obsessions. Like a storyteller of mythic tales, he has created an entire cosmology from the topics, places, and people that prey on his mind. This pantheon includes everything from old movie palaces, to the stately days of luxury sea travel, to George Washington and his legendary deeds, to a young woman Yoda met once at a theater years ago. By deploying these things across his paintings—by bringing them to life—Yoda shows us the topology of a world of his own creation.

In Yoda’s reality, history is compressed, manipulated, and adorned. The eras of silent films and the Revolutionary War live side-by-side here, connected at first by the tenuous fibers of simply being paintings by the same artist. But as we see the work all together, we find common thematic concerns. Nostalgia, for one thing, is prominent. But it’s an uncanny sort of nostalgia in which things feel slightly off, misremembered, or interpreted to the point of being just strange enough that mere sentimentality, a pitfall of much nostalgia, is left behind.

Yoichiro Yoda, in some ways, lives in different times at once. His loving offerings to the memories of New York’s grand movie theaters of the past, crossed with his thoroughly contemporary comics work, in which we are treated to his quite unique sense of humor, are both of our era and not. For Yoichiro Yoda, the world is haunted by the ghosts of then and now.