Rina Yoshizawa

Rina Yoshizawa’s paintings are intimate, granular, and shifting depictions of her immediate surroundings. Her works render deliberate visual misapprehensions, such as the minutia of her house, the light reflected from glasses or laptop screens, or the landscape as seen through curtains. Using a multi-step process of studies as a way to map this drifting reverie, Yoshizawa captures these subjects through photographs using Polaroids, vintage film cameras, or her IPhone, and subsequently sketches in pencil and watercolor on paper. Each of these repeated studies allow for the composition to emerge from the detached reality of her vision. Light refracts and colors oscillate, until space and depth become flattened and abstracted. The culminating paintings receive thin layers of oil and charcoal that tentatively plot the graphic contours of her composition. However, instead of merely representing these images verbatim, Yoshizawa washes away the surfaces of her paintings with water. From here, the paintings truly reveal themselves, wherein each piece becomes a material echo of memory. For Yoshizawa what’s seemingly permanent is ephemeral, and the only way to recover these moments is to accept their passage. Merging the natural landscape and the city, her childhood in the snowy North of Japan to her present in the electric artificiality of Tokyo, Yoshizawa superimposes memory, place, and cultural history. The paintings outline the impossibility to portray her subjective experiences, all the while retrieving something new through her developmental procedures. Rather than being personal mementos, her paintings are universal expressions of daydreaming, their ambiguity open to collective projection and interpretation.

Rina Yoshizawa (b. 1998, Nigita, Japan) lives and works in Tokyo. This is her first solo exhibition in the United States. Select previous exhibitions include a solo exhibition at Tatsuro Kishimoto (Tokyo, Japan), a two-person exhibition at Space Aya (Tokyo, Japan), and a group show at Toyo Media Link (Tokyo, Japan).