September 10, 2011

Matter of hue: Kimiko Yoshida, Yulia Gorodinski

Two of my favorite self-portrait artists are Kimiko Yoshida and Yulia Gorodinski. While you will rather rarely see Yulia's face, you will just see Kimiko's.

Kimiko is a master on monochromatic images. Name a color, remember the most fantastic hue you have dreamed of, and there she is, presenting herself as color. It reminds me of Malevich's black and Rauschenberg's white, of Yves Klein blue, of Rothko's textures.

She can be sweet dressed as a blossoming cherry tree, or ironic when she dresses up as a Chinese-communist frontier officer. Her apparent minimalism is her strength, the strength of pure color: silver, golden, green as tea, white as a nun. Kimiko is the joy of color as we hadn't seen since van Gogh.












Yulia reminds me of William Eggleston colors and his compositions. Her hues seem to be inspired by old polaroid and by the warm light of a Tel Aviv Thursday evening, when people are drowning in joy and life seems easier than never before.

She will always look for that bit of sun that will shape up her image, without sacrificing the composition. Being still, she tries to impress some slight movement on her picture, so that your eyes do not get bored or stuck at one point. But the focus is so precisely found, that your eyes will always come back to it, namely her bared breast, a tattoo, a splash, her legs...












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