Mariane Ibrahim is pleased to announce Flaming Memory, a solo presentation of new works by Tokyo–based painter, Yukimasa Ida, whose portrait-based practice explores the tension between fleeting perception and the lasting imprint of memory on canvas.
Yukimasa Ida builds his paintings through decisive brushstrokes, layering matter onto the canvas to render faces, whether of people close to him or strangers encountered during his travels. These portraits simultaneously convey a sense of vulnerability, marked by the impossibility of truly confronting these figures face to face. At the same time, his recurrent use of red infuses the works with a contagious inner intensity. Imbued with memories of both near and distant presences, Yukimasa Ida’s work lingers in the viewer’s mind like the image of a glowing fire, at once magnetic and perilous.
Through facial abstraction, Ida opens a perspective into the visceral depictions of the psyche. Each painting explores the subject's internal state, inviting viewers to confront the complexity of human experience. The absence of distinction between foreground and background draws the eye to the subtle cues of face figuration: the curve of an ear or shadow of a lip, that anchors one's gaze. The artist’s charged color palette, built over a canvas primed with black, amplifies the somatic intensities of his sculptural oil impasto technique that holds the memory of knife marks and wet-on-wet blending. In this way, Ida’s canvases behave like skin—vulnerable to scars, erosion, and inscription.
In Ida Yukimasa’s work, the canvas becomes mnemonic flesh, a surface that absorbs what perception cannot fully hold: emotion, disorientation, psychic residue. The power of his work lies in its contradiction: while the image dissolves; the material endures. It is the impossibility of permanence, where memory flickers and decays like a flame, yet everything leaves a trace.
Flaming Memory will be on view in Chicago from August 30 to October 25, 2025.
