Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Miyoko Ito
American; 20th-century
Normal, IL: University Galleries of Illinois State University
85%
Tabi Sox or Foot Fetish. c1974. Oil on canvas
There's a band of untouched canvas, here and there corrupted by an errant green, that goes all the way around the edge of this painting's face, thinly. It could be an irregularity from the stretching process, or it could be a deliberate Olitskian bracket that's meant to disappear from conscious perception while still serving to hold the picture inside of its own surface despite the way it seems to want to slink off the canvas and join with the world. (Though there's more pictorial substance to an Ito than to an Olitski, her gradients carry much of the same ambivalence of Olitski's famous washes.) In fact, most of this painting's structure — not just that border — work to particularize the quiet breathing of Ito's gradients: the hook in the painting's lower third keeps the empty section it's dipping into from losing itself in formless opposition to all the architecture just above; lines, though they're always delimiting shapes, are above all pretenses for dramatic color shifts. Ito's forms, in other words, always have an ulterior motive. This justifies the apparent lack of discipline in this painting's arrangement. (2025)