Mika Horibuchi

(Part 2)

There are no enticing bouquets in Horibuchi's homages to Trompe-l’Oeil Still Life. Instead, her Curtain Drawn paintings isolate and enlarge van der Spelt and van Mieris's curtain so that they relate architecturally to the “real” space of the gallery. If fifteenth-century art theorist Leon Battista Alberti's theorized picture plane functions like a window to a viewer's dominion—offering the sense that one is a monarch surveying royal land—Horibuchi's serialized curtains create a wall of windows with airtight seams, trading sovereign rule for yearning and denial.2asup The result removes the treat but leaves the trick, stirring curiosity about a hidden space that doesn't really exist. On one hand, the artist homes in on the mischievous occlusion, a creamy blue closed loop, reminding us of the limits of vision. On the other, she cracks a highbrow pun: Curtain Drawn is a curtain, drawn. Readjusting attention to the original painted curtain as a double agent of frustration and fantasy, her subject is not really the fabric, nor even a specific Dutch painting, but that split second when both jokes land.

Painting in particular is a medium that requires a split consciousness. Twentieth-century art historian E. H. Gombrich understood this, explaining, “We file it not in terms of reality, but as an existing type of representation.”3asup When we look at a painting, we willingly suspend disbelief—essentially tricking ourselves on purpose. The trompe in trompe l'oeil tricks the eye into seeing a faithful replica of real life. Horibuchi's trompe creates a replica of that replica, faith or no faith. Her period room at the MCA, in which every piece of furniture is a painting, operates in the same way. This is a living room, it tells its viewer, but one that is not to be used for living. It is spatialized trompe l'oeil, a room-shaped curtain that can't be drawn. Two millennia after Pliny's parable, Horibuchi leaves the earnest plane of playing rationality for a fool and veers toward unapologetic ambivalence.

(Part 3)

The experience of seeing a non-curtain, or entering a non-room, puts one in a rather paranoid position: instead of pining after the bouquet, we want to get to the bottom of things. Each component points to a network of obscured associations. Horibuchi's paintings, which are highly figurative yet devoid of figures, operate almost like those of twentieth-century Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico, who understood that classical materials such as marble and fabric could be psychologically evocative—his shadowy village squares are not so much desolate as recently deserted, as though the last person to leave had just a moment before slipped into the darkness behind a colonnade. Horibuchi's paintings are hardly scenes, especially those like Black Marble (2014) that imitate artistic mediums in dissimilar materials such as folded paper or textiles; instead, eeriness lives in the implied material itself, imbuing motionless substance with the quality of the just-fleeted.

These material studies are particularly illustrative. Art historian Georges Didi-Huberman describes the decorative registers of a fifteenth- century Fra Angelico fresco meant to imitate swirling marble. Essentially throw-away panels, the reproductions were cheaper to create than the real thing, and were entirely supplementary to the figurative, devotional paintings displayed above. Writing in the 1990s, with centuries of art historical hindsight, Didi-Huberman saw in the marbled veins an anachronistic evocation— even a premonition—of Jackson Pollock's splatters. That is, with historical distance, the faux marble is retroactively appreciable as abstraction, not just attempted mimesis.4asup In Horibuchi's case, we can now “read” the original Dutch painting in the inverse manner: not as the abstraction that it is, several levels removed from reality, but as something that comments on our now-thoroughly mediated world of vision. Fra Angelico hoped viewers might overlook his faux marble; Horibuchi dares us to look right at its illusory veins.

To break open these illusions, Horibuchi depicts the very image that led to Gombrich's conclusion about painting and reality: a classic optical trick resembling a duck as well as a rabbit. Ludwig Wittgenstein, an Austrian- British philosopher of language, was also bemused by this drawing. He devoted a detailed discussion to the way it complicates an easy definition of visual perception, taking care to distinguish between “the 'continuous seeing' of an aspect and an aspect's 'lighting up.'”5asup The former is the total tangle of lines that he knows quite well to be a visual pun, and the latter is the flashes of recognition when one character emerges from that tangle to become the dominant image, if only briefly. Addressing the viewer's alienation from the visible object, he wrote: “Someone suddenly sees something which he does not recognize (it may be a familiar object, but in an unusual position or lighting); the lack of recognition perhaps lasts only a few seconds. Is it correct to say that he has a different visual experience from someone who recognized the object straightaway?”6asup Perception is phenomenologically dependent on context, language, and image associations: all degrees of familiarity. It should come as a delightful surprise but not a shock that RD FB (2017), Horibuchi's oil painting of the duck-rabbit—ever a projection screen for psychological familiarity and a cipher for our dashed expectations—is actually a rendering of an ink stamp she had produced of the drawing. It is a wily study in over-determination.

(Part 4)

A devoted student of painting, Horibuchi often scrambles our perceptions and preconceptions of the mediums she uses. After sending a watercolor set to her grandmother in Japan, she started to receive snapshots of

her grandmother's delicate still lives and landscapes in the mail. Horibuchi recreated these images in oil paint, stretching the usual opacity of the medium to retain the fluid, brushy appearance of the watercolors. A closer look reveals, however, that the paintings are not reproductions of her grandmother's watercolors, but of the photographs of the water-colors: at the corner of each canvas, carefully rendered in oil, is the telltale date stamp of a point-and-shoot camera. The result is a painting of a photograph of a painting from life, with several degrees of separation between the work and its real-world referent, buried in layers of representation. Paradoxically, these layers become ways to close the distance between the artist and her family across the world.

In the constellation of her practice, these "watercolors" are both sentimental objects and structural provocations. Their titles—Watercolor of Persimmons, for instance—ask linguistic questions as much as painterly ones: what do we call a work when we know full well it

is a photograph, a watercolor, an oil painting, and a love letter all

at once? What happens when the work crosses not just mediums but also continents, generations, and languages? These titles are not meant to fool but to invite us into these tender conundrums. Like water in a pigment set, Horibuchi’s project liquidates fixed categories, thinning out points of origin and of reference so that they may blend into each other.

(Part 5)

As we relearn daily in the stream of digital media, our trust in rendered images diminishes with each subsequent leap in technological innovation. What is an artist to do? Competing strategies emerge: one might be to do away with pictorial representation altogether, bringing original documents directly into the gallery to live a second life as their own strange monuments. The other, at which Horibuchi excels, is to dig even further into mediation, to layer representations on representations, and to abstract vision to the point that we can see the edges of our perception—a shared language, constructed and imperfect. In doing so, she reveals the surprising twist in the story of the supposedly rational subject. As she explains knowingly: "A slight betrayal of expectations is at play."