Masae Uezumi's recent work with its strong contours, and exquisitely hallucinatory handling of vermillion, rose and purple suggests a unity of vision, a world made whole. Yet it is also clear that we are being taken in by a field of projection (a vision of search, let us say) rather than by vision itself (that is, opticality). The artist�fs restless exploration is amplified by the spectral flush her compositions suggestive of a reality that is always in flux within a flow of duration. If there is any constant to any of this, the artist seems to be intimating, it is to be intuited by each individual.

         Any residual trace of nostalgia in Uezumi�fs vision is tinged with a degree of restless disaffection at the totalization of experience. Such subjective distress seems discordant with the decorative unity of the canvas. Still, such disjuncture only adds to the psychic pulse and the tremulousness of Uezumi�fs renditions of urban and the often-indeterminate suburban spaces of Paris and Provence.

         Her recent work stresses seismic moments of sublime isolation and evacuation. The lived-world seems to drop off as a yawning oceanic tranquility abetted, somehow, by frenzy takes its place before us. Perhaps we might look at the artist�fs visionary renditions as recuperative flashpoints or imagistic triggers. They bring home the desire to wrest time away from the intangible and the ephemeral and a concomitant human need to forestall the inevitability of change is made poignantly clear. While the sense of localized placelessnes bounded by the impossible surging of both rememoration and presentness are reflected through Masae Uezumi�fs pictorial efforts there is something more at stake here for her: willingness to risk sharing moments of intensity, longing and doubt. The past now finds its reanimation through the fierce mind�fs eye of the artist.

Dominique Nahas

Dominique Nahas is an independent curator and critic based in Manhattan. He teaches critical theory at Pratt Institute and is a critique faculty member of the New York Studio Program.

He is the 2007-8 critic-in-residence at the Hoffberger Graduate School at the Maryland Institute College of Art.