leaf

leaf　　2022　　oil on canvas　　27.3 x 27.3 cm

Asuka Yokono was born in 1987 in Aichi, Japan, and completed her Master's degree in Fine Arts at Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Arts and Music in 2013. She lives and works in Nagoya, Japan. Asuka Yokono is a painter known for her powerful style of painting with vigorous strokes on canvas. At the “Whereabouts of Painting” exhibition held at the Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery in 2014, which featured a group of up-and-coming young painters, she quickly attracted attention as “the artist of that dam! and attracted a great deal of attention. Her landscapes and still lifes, composed with speedy strokes of straight and curved lines and simple forms, give the viewer a pleasant sense of cleanliness and presence.

However, after the Corona disaster, she exhibited two large paintings depicting the Seto region at the International Art Festival Aichi 2022, and since then, we can see a change in her style. The experience of completing a large painting led to a search for a more optimal brushstroke that would express his inner self.

It must be about how one can establish on the canvas a vitality and presence that cannot be expressed by strokes alone. The “bouquet” and “rounded paper” presented here express a strange presence similar to that of the Meiji period painters Takahashi Yuichi and Kishida Ryusei. Yokono's honest exploration of painting is progressing slowly but surely.