The paintings of Matsukawa Tomona

I discovered Mastukawa Tomona’s dark and sensually intriguing work in a group exhibition at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo (May 2016). Matsukawa’s work is atmospheric. You can almost touch or even smell what has been depicted on canvas. She creates photo-realistic paintings that depict women or objects in close-up. The images are visually pleasing, calm, even silent but are full of hidden tension and easily trigger imaginary stories from an unknown world. A face obfuscated by shadows, blurry stains on a nightgown. Without names or faces, Matsukawa avoids telling an actual story but by doing so creates space for suggestive abstraction, like snapshots from life behind the spotlights.