When I was a child, I had a recurring dream, in which I was meandering across a serene landscape and would eventually come upon a long row of parked bicycles that stretched far into the horizon (and right up against a cliff?). I would then slowly approach this column of bicycles and either lightly touch or gently lean against them. Immediately, in one dreamtime instant, all of the bikes would slam to the ground (over the cliff?) with a loud CLAP, and I would jump awake with fright and a sense of curious dread would be delivered to the pit of my stomach.
Ulala Imai’s paintings—in particular, her lush, combination still life/landscape, over-scaled oil painting simply titled Lovers—conjures this kind of queasy, dreamlike sensation with its breakneck collapse of zoomed and dilated focus, incredibly near and impossibly far placed directly on top of each other, and an eerie freeze of fluttering movement and stark stillness.
This is rendered narratively in all of Imai’s work through her favored subject matter—a sort of tilted and staged everydayness, embodied by a domestic pantheon of at hand dolls, figurines, masks, and toys, as well as assorted combinations of breakfast, lunch, and dinner food stuffs.
However, just as important and in fact, as effective in fostering this uncanny atmosphere, is the lush physicality of paint and Imai’s loose virtuosity with it. In Lovers, a miasma of liquid paint quickly assembles before your eyes (almost as fast as the bikes fell in my dream) into an almost photographic depiction of a pair of dolls/lovers (Charlie Brown and Lucy Van Pelt) somehow stranded in a treetop or stuck deep in a bush. Especially when seen with the naked eye, these marks assemble and disassemble back and forth in a way that directly mirrors the subject matter’s pivot between banal and beautiful as well as the actual dolls depicted position, both near and far, in painted space.
The punctum of this creepy fidget, for me, is the swift brushstroke sitting right on the surface of the canvas that briskly renders the sewn line of Lucy’s mouth, a motion of wet-on-wet paint, the application of which you can easily conjure in your head, but once fallen into place as the unreal doll mouth, continually struggles against its plain materiality.
While Imai’s work is often situated within the context of a history of impressionistic and expressionistic, figurative painting, to me, the above mentioned tussle/collusion between material and meaning, and the plumbing of the seemingly shallow depths of the everyday, all filtered through a loose and casual painterly meticulousness with which small things are rendered large, silly things scary, and banal things portentous, puts her in a more specific lineage with artists such as Hans Bellmer, Balthus, Morton Bartlett, Gertrude Abercrombie, and Leonora Carrington.
The conversation between the three works presented here, Imai’s Lovers, Thomas Moran’s meticulous 1913 lithograph, Grand Canyon of Arizona from Hermit Rim Road, with its multiplying and tight, competing perspectives, and the scale and functional play in the ceramic lamp/portrait bust/sculpture by Soshiro Matsubara, effectively restages the quasi-theatrical narrative and material superimpositions depicted within each work individually, when seen through, next to, or after each other, or even, while just holding them in your mind at the same time. The tingling combination of nature induced sublime panic, dizzying hyperfocused micro attention, and dream logic’s time-mind-body confusion that Imai’s painting specializes in, is sprinkled through all three works when seen in concert. A real time palimpsest of near and far, material and the things it’s depicting, the suburban and the cosmic, all sort of twitching between states, before your eyes.
The third presentation of ‘A Lover’s Discourse’ featured Ulala Imai in the company of Thomas Moran & Soshiro Matsubara at the Aspen Art Museum from September 1–October 15, 2023. Read more about the exhibition here.
Matt Connors is an artist based in New York and Los Angeles.
