Defining Absence

Yoshitomo Nara
February 28 – March 28, 2009
Marianne Boesky Gallery


I’ve been wondering for a little while now why Yoshitomo Nara’s work is so unsettling. Large cartoon paintings of little girls with jelly bean heads, sculpted bob hairdos, and oversized eyes hardly seems like subject matter that should evoke uneasiness. They look more like the diary drawings of an eight year old girl with all their variations of sass, boredom, violence and silliness, than the latest additions in the career of a middle aged Japanese man.

The front two rooms of the gallery are filled with drawings and paintings large enough to fill a mantle piece, small enough to fold up and put in your pocket, and everywhere in between. The drawings are more active with evocative text like, the massive “Rock’n Roll The Roll” in lipstick red graffiti featuring a lumpy headed girl with hips angled out strumming her little figure-eight shaped guitar. The tops of her eyes slanted down and her frowning line mouth half open indicates her aggressive concentration, while action lines and musical notes project out from her. Coffee table book sized drawings in pencil feature girls in plain outlined square dresses with half circle poesy collars and blank backgrounds. They arbitrarily sit in a chair, wear a round nose and whiskers, and stare from underneath a heavy shock of long line hair with words like “Creep” and “NYC” around and on them. In poster sized acrylic paintings the girls are cut off just below the white collar and stare silently through vacuous circle eyes of blue-grey or emerald-gold or stick out a pink tongue from a disk slot mouth under the curved lines to indicate closed lids. The back room is even more off-putting with two cobble wood shingled turret cottages, one filled with colorful stuffed animals and a roof pointing up through the ceiling, the other broken or burned off at the top housing a small living space with a tiny desk, drawing materials and radio/cd player. A painting fills the back wall of the stuffed animal cottage looming over the interior space like an alter the toys worship and in the other small drawings, stuck up haphazardly, seem like the products of the non-existent occupant.

Despite the variety of poses and the subtle variation between size, detail and action, these little girls always have one thing in common: their monumental absence. The exhibition feels like a voyeuristic peek into a culture of little humanoid creatures who could be gone for an hour or forever. They stare at us through images made mostly of simple lines that indicate feelings but their eyes, actions and dwellings are empty of anything but semblance. The rooms of the show are sterilized, desensitized, filled with sentimental objects that have been stripped of their sentiment. It makes me uneasy but intrigued by both the creatures themselves and what Nara might be saying about our ideological, image hungry culture through them: in the absence of something real in life, emotion or depiction what is there? Does it do us harm or pleasure?