Izima Kaoru, One Sun @Von Lintel

JTF (just the facts): A total of 6 large scale color images, displayed in artist-designed white frames with no mat in the single room gallery space. All of the works are c-prints with acrylic diasec from 2006 and 2007. The circular prints are each 47 inches in diameter, in editions of 5. A thin monograph of this body of work was published by Akio Nagasawa Publishing in 2009. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Japanese photographer Izima Kaoru is perhaps best known for his series of cinematic images where models imagine their own ideal deaths, complete with dramatic locations, fabulous couture fashions, and elegant pools of blood. After more than a decade of staged death, his new body of work, entitled One Sun, is a radical departure from this morbid fascination, a life-affirming look skyward.

Using a fish-eye lens and day-long exposures, Kaoru's images trace the path of the sun across the sky, resulting in images of sparkling bright lines against light blue orbs of hazy color. Depending on his location (near the Equator, in the northern Norway, or at various other locations around the globe) and the time of year/season, the sun creates a variety of concave and convex arcs, straight lines and even perfect circles, with cloudy weather periodically adding a dashed effect. These beams of light parade across a spectrum of soft blue, light purple and fuzzy pink pastel backgrounds, with only a few silhouetted palm tress, buildings, or other minuscule points of landscape around the edges to provide local context. They are like big blue marbles, or vibrating discs, or portholes.

In the past few years, we have seen quite a few photographers point their cameras up, following stars, satellites, and the sun and moon, mixing science and abstraction to generate unexpected landscapes or simulated line drawings. Kaoru's images bear some resemblance to the recent Sunburn pictures by Chris McCaw, but their glossy object quality, large size and strict conceptual geometries create an altogether different feeling than McCaw's intimate chance-driven solarized burns. The works feel much wider, capturing the incandescent radiance of the sun and the immense 360 degree breadth of the sky. I think the layers of roundness (the fish-eye distortion, the underlying shape of the earth and sun, the shape of the physical prints themselves) all contribute to making the conceptual construct effective.

Overall, while we have seen variations on these ideas before, Kaoru has added some new twists to the tracking of the sun, creating contemporary photographs that pulsate with collective optimism. He reminds us that wherever we might be on this diverse planet, the sun puts on a spectacular show if we would only take the time to look up and notice.

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced in rising editions, starting at $16000 and moving up to $19500 and eventually to $23000. Kaoru's work has only recently come into the secondary markets, with a few of his large scale images from the Landscapes with a Corpse series coming up for sale in the past few years. Prices for these works have ranged between $9000 and $30000.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Reviews: DLK COLLECTION, 2009 (here), NY Times, 2004 (here)

Izima Kaoru, One Sun
Through October 9th

Von Lintel Gallery
520 West 23rd Street
New York, NY 10011

Izima Kaoru, New Work @Von Lintel

JTF (just the facts): A total of 8 color works on display: 7 large scale c-prints, framed in blond wood without mats, and 1 group of 4 smaller prints, mounted to plexiglass but not framed. The larger c-prints are approximately 70x94 or 70x60 and come in editions of 5. The smaller images are 20x26. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Japanese photographer Izima Kaoru has been making images in his series Landscapes with a Corpse for a decade now. In each series, a famous Japanese actress or model imagines her perfect fantasy "death", complete with the designer clothes she would be wearing at the time. Kaoru then creates the elaborate settings and makes pictures from a variety of cinematic distances: the close-up (eyes open), medium range images, and far away wide angle shots. The effect is an extremely elegant crime scene, the opposite of the grittiness of Weegee's real life corpses in the gutter.

I first saw an image from this series several years ago, a huge print of a woman "dead" on the floor of a pachinko parlor, surrounded by neon pink chairs and fallen amidst a sea of silvery balls. I was taken aback by its over-the-top glamour and the lushness of its eye-popping colors. Nearly every review of Kaoru's work is riddled with words like shocking and disturbing, morbid and repulsive. And yet, my reaction was and still is just the opposite. These images are, in my view, nothing more than an adult version of the play acting and dress up games of childhood, complete with couture gowns and lavish locations. I'm not sure these new works, which lack any visible signs of injury, would even be classified as unsettling.

In this small show, I particularly enjoyed the series of images called Sakai Maki wears Jil Sander, 2008, where a woman in a sheer salmon colored dress and sky blue shoes lies in a room full of white flowers. These works are dreamlike and calm, with a quirky surreal and conceptual feel that reminded me of Magritte. The other works on display are more straightforward in their settings, but equally serene and peaceful.

For Western audiences who have no familiarity with these Japanese actresses and models (like me), the individual people become more like beautiful mannequins (they're supposed to be dead after all) in a carefully styled fashion shoot. I think if Julia Roberts or Kate Moss (or someone else equally recognizable here) were inserted instead of the Japanese women, I think the images might have a very different resonance.

Collector's POV: The large images in the show are priced at either $22500 or $27000; the group of smaller images is $14000. In the secondary markets, Kaoru's work has only just become available at auction in the last year, so there isn't enough data to form any meaningful pricing pattern. While not every image in Kaoru's large and growing project is a winner, a handful of stand out pictures can be found that would fit well in most contemporary collections.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Izima Kaoru, New Work
Through April 25th

Von Lintel Gallery
555 West 25th Street
New York, NY 10001