ULALA IMAI

‘I paint works just like I make my daily meals,’ says Imai, describing the quotidian and ritualistic nature of her nearly two-decade-long practice. Working from the home outside Tokyo that she shares with her partner and their three children, Imai arranges the contents of her immediate environment into discrete, self-contained universes within her paintings. With confident, unbroken brushstrokes, she imbues the objects that surround her and her family with an animating light, transforming them into a ragtag cast of characters. In CALM, Imai’s protagonists leave their familiar domestic realm behind and embark on a journey out into the unknown.

In some of Imai’s recent paintings, teddy bears stand with quiet resolve in rustic landscapes. The wall-spanning diptych _Lost _(2024) places two of Imai’s bears in the aftermath of the magnitude 7.5 earthquake on Japan’s Noto Peninsula that threw the contents of the ocean floor onto the coastline. The artist depicts this threatened landscape in jagged, almost Cubist shapes; light bounces off the planar sides of stones and trickles through the quivering needles on a pine tree. The beady eyes of the two central figures telescope their simultaneous shock and brave determination to find their way home. Wind tousles the fur of the bear at the center of _Atlantis _(2024), suggesting its movement through the rocky landscape. Imai’s solvent-thinned oil paint endows each of her subjects with a glowing, translucent aura. ‘In her world,’ writes Hiji Nam, ‘every object seems illuminated and alive—the snow, the light, the wind, the toys, and the grass sentient as if animated by an interconnected world soul.’

Back inside of her home, Imai groups figures from a familiar crew of characters into tightly-composed relational ensembles. Works like _Party _(2024), where an array of toys pose together, appearing to stare directly out at the viewer, take cues from group portraits like Diego Velázquez’s _Las Meninas _(1656) and Rembrandt’s _The Anatomy Lecture of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp _(1632). Imai’s use of her own domestic space, however, upends the masculinist associations of the royal court and the academy. _Green Gables _(2023), a painting of a dollhouse depicted with Imai’s simultaneously flat and layered approach to color, allegorizes the domestic space that is the site and subject of her practice. This house-within-a-house, which has appeared in a number of her canvases, engages the long art historical tradition of dollhouses as metaphors for the space of the mind—Laurie Simmons, Florine Stettheimer, Robert Gober, and Mike Kelley have all used the miniature dwellings as metaphors for psychic interiority.

In her renderings of cantaloupe slices, buttered toast, turnips, and other foods, Imai’s visible strokes come together to suggest something hyperreal. These intimate tableaux evoke the still lifes of Édouard Manet, whose 1880 image of a bunch of white asparagus remains a pivotal touchstone for Imai. Her vision of mundane domestic life is one of beauty and clarity, of a space where making a still life becomes an opportunity for reflection. With the same frequency that she makes her daily meals, Imai records the precious revelations of the everyday.