Ralph Iwamoto at David Findlay Jr

Art in America, Jan, 2005 by Elisa Decker

Hawaiian-born Ralph Iwamoto moved to New York in 1948, at the age of 21. There he studied with Byron Browne and Vaclav Vytlacil at the Art Students League and immersed himself in the styles of the day. Featured in this exhibition were 11 oil and casein paintings on linen from two series completed between 1955 and 1958, a period during which Iwamoto arrived at a distinctly personal synthesis of modern trends and traditional Japanese esthetics. The stylized flat shapes that animate these canvases are informed by the natural world and by man-made objects. Iwamoto would later simplify his forms, taking up nonobjective geometric abstraction.

Seven medium-sized vertical works from 1955 portray bizarre, brightly colored animal/vegetable characters and reflect the teeming plant life of Hawaii. Lowly Splendor (44 by 28 inches), sometimes called Napoleon and Josephine by the artist, depicts an exuberant pair of vegetal hybrids cavorting against a lush viridian green-pthalo blue background. A bird of paradise forms "Napoleon's" head and hat; shapes akin to the alternating bracts of a heliconia plant align themselves to form his spinal column, which sprouts from an efflorescent torch ginger. "Josephine" emerges from a shoot, Jack-and-the-Beanstalk style, a yellowgreen, bird bone-shaped body with trellislike appendages and a white chrysanthemum for a head. Together they raise a blue-petaled flower in a celebratory gesture. Other works from this series portray scarier creatures and conjure up ghost tales remembered from childhood. The figure in Wild Growth, for example, has the fierceness of a Polynesian tiki doll.

In the four larger horizontal paintings from the later series, aggressive frontality gives way to the muted tones of a meditative universe. Gracefully curved planar forms and puzzle shapes nudge and turn around one another, often overlapping and drifting off the edge like figures in a ukiyo-e print. Baziotes also comes to mind. A layer of flake white applied with a palette knife creates shapes with raised edges, giving the paintings a collaged appearance. Color has been brushed on and then wiped off the dry underlayer, leaving an antiqued effect with raised white lines. In Winter Mist (1958), darker forms are suspended on a cloudy, light-blue ground. One antiqued gray-green shape suggests a Japanese stone lantern, while its surface mimes an aerial view of a meandering river. The lantern shape is overlapped by a cartouche embossed with stylized calligraphy derived from hanko seals, recalling Mark Tobey's white writing. Black coralline tracery floats in from the upper right, partially hidden by the other two forms. A bluish-white version ornaments a striated oblong shape below. Small lozenges surround it, their delicate patina evoking the gold and silver dust traditionally applied to Japanese lacquerware. Iwamoto's paintings of the '50s give form to the Shinto belief that nothing really dies and everything returns as another form of energy.