Kyoko Idetsu “I want to wear a warm sweater.”

Bridget Donahue

This event has ended.

In English, we often refer to the domestic as a sphere, a space akin to the shape of the earth as a whole, tucked inside like a nesting doll, floating solitary and suspended, insulated. The habits and rituals repeat endlessly, even when we drag our feet, as though they are the ones pulling us along.
Repetition, maintenance, and care: these currents hem and weave within Idetsu’s paintings.
Realms touch without becoming enmeshed, sometimes carved out, divided on the canvas itself. A private glimpse of home is cradled inside a sweater; a woman cycles across a witnessed event and its imagined future repercussions, embodying an experience that is not fully hers. Tenderness and trauma are both banal, unfolding in amorphous scenes. One might be tempted to call the works vignettes. Idetsu’s unaffected, syncopated musings on each work evoke a parable, but one without moral resolution.

Maintenance and care operate on a plane that occasionally dips and bends from its parallel nature to the strictly linear, punctual time of the public space. Lisa Baraitser has written about this at length, asserting maintenance as the temporal practice of care. “What maintenance does is keep us attached to time itself, in that it recognizes that ‘betterment’ is not a time in the future, but the time we labour within now, in its repetitious, bleak, and at times ugly forms.”1
There is an unavoidable grotesqueness in time’s passage and perhaps more so in the uncompensated efforts to maintain a daily life against its intractable presence. What does care mean in the wake of this?

“I have often thought about care,” Idetsu writes about the painting 世, 2021 . She follows with a quote, or possibly an idiom, unattributed to a source, but seemingly read or overheard: “Care is a labor of love that must often continue even when love wavers.”
-Sabrina Tamar

Kyoko Idetsu (b. Japan) lives and works in Tokyo. Selected solo exhibitions include He had no choice but to do so., Brulee (Shunsuke Imai Studio), Tokyo (2020); Emotion, ArtCenterOngoing, Tokyo (2019); Draw me a beautiful picture to hang in my house., LUCKY HAPPY STUDIO, Tokyo (2017); Milky Way, ArtCenterOngoing, Tokyo (2017); The Landscape I Saw the Other Day, ArtCenterOngoing, Tokyo (2012). Selected group exhibitions include Kyoko Idetsu and Leo Okubo, Lavender Open Chair, Tokyo (2021); Natsuyasumi, Nonaka-Hill, Los Angeles (2021); Fictions of Everyday Life, Akibatamabi 21, Tokyo (2016); TERATOTERA Festival , Tokyo (2015), among others. Idetsu will have a solo presentation at Frieze, Los Angeles with Nonaka-Hill in February 2023.

1 Lisa Baraitser, “Touching Time: Maintenance, Endurance, Care”, Psychosocial Imaginaries: Perspectives on Temporality, Subjectivities and Activism, p.43