Yui Yaegashi

Yui Yaegashi develops her painting in a rigorous yet open engagement with systems. Textile elements were an important starting point for her artistic practice, serving both as a formal component and a conceptual impetus. She primarily works in oil on small-format canvases, building her compositions based on self-imposed rules. These predetermine the format, palette, tools, and the order of paint application. These parameters do not restrict the work but rather bring it forth, so that each painting is the result of a structured and yet contingent process.

The intimate dimensions of Yaegashi’s paintings invite close looking and draw viewers into a spatial and temporal encounter with the work. From a distance, the compositions appear as coherent structures; however, upon closer inspection, they break down into fragments, revealing deposited layers, hidden gestures, and moments of hesitation, at times lucid, then again ambiguous, stable, only to dissolve in the next moment. Time seems to play an important role in them: In a fast-paced art economy that thrives on attention and demands production, Yui Yaegashi quietly concentrates on painting one oil layer after another, often waiting for months for one to dry in order to conceal the effort expended beneath the next. A plea for slowness and un-productivity thus becomes a means of defying the thoughtless speed of the contemporary art world.