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Kai Yoda’s Animist Paintings and the Beast Within

The Japanese-French artist is drawing on spirituality, inherited family trauma and geographies to build a symbolic world far messier and more personal than anything he made as part of Ittah Yoda.

There is an energetic aura surrounding the figures that inhabit the paintings of Japanese-French artist Kai Yoda, though it’s not an energy one would necessarily describe as uplifting.  More often, these figures appear as haunting, ghostly presences, emerging through the alchemy of paint as if summoned from the abysses of hell (or from traumas buried deep within the subconscious). Having disbanded the artistic duo he created with partner Ittah Yoda, Kai Yoda embarked upon a new chapter in his recently closed exhibition at Bremond Capela in Paris, where he brought forth a highly charged symbolic world informed by family traumas, inherited memories and a series of intensified visions he accessed in a recent journey of self-discovery. Particularly influential was his recent stay in Indonesia, coinciding with an exhibition at Rho Projects. There, he reconnected with a more animistic spirituality, attuning himself to the landscape’s energies and the many species inhabiting it, and that experience found its way into the saturated atmospheres that characterize his latest body of work.

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Yoda’s most recent paintings are the result of an intuitive, spontaneous exercise aimed at reconnecting with something deeper within both the soul and the earth: the resilience of natural cycles and the energies of elemental forces. He primarily works with organic pigments, gathered substances, incense, oil paint, dyes and beeswax, materials that naturally open a space between inner and outer projection. Layer upon layer accumulates until symbolic evocations of bodies and spirits emerge almost magmatically from the very matter of the paintings themselves, suggesting the possibility of endless metamorphosis into new forms.

“I think I’m still kind of realizing myself, in the process. It’s quite difficult to check distance,” he candidly told Observer during a walkthrough of the show. While many of the works initially read as lyrical abstractions emerging from the subconscious, they remain deeply........

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