Aki Narita in "Hito Hito" (Person to Person) Metropolitan Museum of Tokyo
Hiroto Ohnogi
Aki Narita, Tedious Skirt.
The paintings of Aki Narita reach down into primal darkness and bring the parts missing from more academic works in "Hito Hito" (Person to Person) at the Metropolitan Museum of Tokyo, up into consciousness. Narita’s paintings are almost passed by at first glance, but a deep temptation slowly, silently calls out from work like Tedious Skirt. Confronting this portrait of a young woman, I feel inexorably pulled into a helpless, fateful encounter. The erotic aura in the painting, with the girl’s legs crossed and hitched up, creating a geometric revelation of her private parts, is like an electro-magnetic wave emanating from the body of this young vestal virgin. She seems to see into our innermost thoughts. The young woman’s wet eye and mysterious strength makes us lose ourselves, caught in fascination as the buried pheromones tempt and pull us into her crafty maze.
Narita has said that her art comes from an imagined memory of her mother’s womb, and women’s frustration with the burden of having a womb. Narita seems more interested in expressing the deepest core of women’s substance than in simply eroticizing the woman’s body.
Narita’s work pours from her emotion rather than from any natural skill in drawing. One feels the artist’s emotion in every single hair that she draws. The special quality of her paintings is found in the ecstasy that could only be expressed by a woman–men could never feel or understand it.
Narita may instinctively know that the viewer’s heart can be grasped more honestly by nakedly exposing the depths of her own insides, rather than by trying to explain human nature through mere expressed sexuality. Her subject matter may come from a mature woman’s memory of girlhood, or it could be a self-portrait unconsciously drawn.
