Emi Mizukami at Ehrlich Steinberg

Emi Mizukami, The sun is steel blazing (installation view) (2024). Acrylic paint, charcoal pencil, pastel, sand paste, and desert sand on linen, 57.5 x 44.5 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Ehrlich Steinberg. Photo: Evan Walsh.

Emi Mizukami’s paintings feel both ethereal and fixed, like figments or mirages caught and set down in cement. Horses, archways, human figures, spheres, snakes, and swords emerge and dissolve into the richly textured picture planes of Million Bubbles, the Tokyo-based artist’s solo show at Ehrlich Steinberg. Here, the distinction between form and formlessness, or narrative and chaos, is as transparent and provisional as the skin of water that cleaves the space within a bubble from the space without.

The paintings comprise many strata: iterative coats of sand paste, acrylic, and charcoal pencil build on linen stretched over wood panel. Yet the work achieves a fluidity that belies its material density. The rough, plaster-like surfaces and half-obscured figures and symbols recall both unrestored frescoes and palimpsests, fading and accumulating at once. Other formal elements blur the paintings’ boundaries. Gobs of sand paste extend past the unframed edges of fleeting dream (all works 2024) and The sun is steel blazing, subverting the panel’s hard lines. The untrimmed linen bordering Search for the jade ball in the spiral space is part of the piece’s form and a reminder of that form’s contingency: A single swath of linen shifts between stretched, painted canvas and free-flowing drape. I appreciated, too, how the stucco of the gallery’s east wall echoed Mizukami’s built-up surfaces, as if the paintings had emerged from the wall, or the wall had seeped out of the work. 

This sense of flux informs the paintings’ subject matter, too. Much of the imagery suggests the flow and momentum of narrative, but refuses the stable logic of plot. The figure in The sun is steel blazing holds a sword, or maybe a unicorn horn, perhaps to wield against the snake that intersects the figure’s body. The shadowy manor in Out of the house and into the woods suggests imminent intrigue, while a motif of doorways implies further rooms, other worlds. Yet these potential plotlines remain indistinct: Characters and chronologies jumble and overlap, as if told by many voices at once, and altered in each telling. I studied One day, you became a horse for a full minute before I saw the horse prancing in the lower right corner; it felt like the swirling, blue-gray tumult of the composition had coalesced only momentarily in equine form. If a painting, like a narrative, is an imposition of form on an otherwise anarchic array of material, then Mizukami’s paintings delight in their own chaos, their forms and subjects defined as much by the entropy that is their substrate as they are by the shapes they take. 

Emi Mizukami: Million Bubbles runs from September 14–November 2, 2024 at Ehrlich Steinberg (5540 Santa Monica Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90038).