Numerous images pass in front of us in everyday life – scenes seen from commuter trains, the evening sky between buildings, faded billboards, TV news and computer screens, images remembered from childhood or discursive fancies, and so on. Yet sometimes, for no apparent reason, I find myself tripped up and caught by one of these images, and a chill runs down my spine. This is only momentarily, then I am pulled back into the stream of images in my busy daily life. That image that briefly held my life can be avoided, removed and forgotten almost immediately.

There are people who pay attention to, become fascinated by, or stop before such images permanently. Eiko Tanaka is one. She is possessed by the image that rarely reveals itself, like a stigma impressed on a scene from daily-life. Heteromorphic imageries peculiar to the humid Japanese climate stubbornly survive, hiding ubiquitously but deeply in our social structure, holding their breath in the urban darkness between the skyscrapers.

Tanaka’s sensitivity makes her able to sniff out such hidden scenes, and look into each one with a minute reconsideration. She accumulates and gradually categorises these findings. Moreover, by intentional selection, extraction and re-composition, she conspires to expose these images to her viewers. She identifies and fixes onto her canvases the afterimages taken from the peripherals of our consciousness. Or it might be that she fixes there the faintest traces of all-but forgotten memories. Her process results in a kind of visual noise on the verge of rubbing us up the wrong way. Such ceaseless effort and contrivance is the substance of Tanaka’s work.

It is not easy to fix and to communicate the catabolism of daily life in fresh and raw experiences. To do so, her work involves cutting images out from everyday life (such as by photography), removing the emotional value inherent in them (by collage) and making them into a tableau with a purified noise-level (by acrylic painting and lithography). The secret of Tanaka’s magic is the process of going back and forth between media, and the final flat surface of her colour compositions is the result of multiple image-filtering. We should not forget that there is a darkness on the back of the clear colour images, which is secretly looking at us.

- Nobuyuki Kobayashi
Professor, School of Culture, Media and Society, Waseda University

Courtesy of Art Front Gallery