Yui Uchida 内田ユイ
Emilie THOMAS
Gallery Director @ AIFA gallery | Art Galleries, Art historian, Curating
Animated film’s drawings | From legacy to a new mode of painting
Yui Uchida is part of the young contemporary Japanese art scene. Her artistic world is inspired by the animated films she discovered at an early age and is the result of experimentation.?
Yui Uchida's works on transparent film paintings are a nod to cel paintings but her aim is not to preserve an artistic technique but to use it to explore a new mode of painting and to render motion within one frame. She expresses it, within a box, by the depiction and decomposition of a movement that could be compared to a sequence of an animation . Yui amplifies it even further by the wavy wrinkles of the polyester film that render the impression of reliefs.
On a traditional canvas painting, the artist realises the background first and finishes with the detail. Yui Uchida creates her paintings on the back of the transparent film; her technique is then reversed to standardness and may lead the viewer to discover the picture by the other side of the screen. The use of a transparent film as a visible support providing the work with its own rendering must be interpreted in perspective with traditional painting requiring the use of a support, however, this time invisible on purpose.
The acrylic box is an indissociable part of the work itself and has two meanings; it first refers to a cell’s membrane without which an organism could not survive, second it is also linked to the transparent barriers erected to prevent the spread of viruses; a reference to those transparent walls preventing us to see each other’s, supposedly preserving our lives.