‘SEEPS AND SLIPS AND SWARMS’: HITOKO URAGO’S PAINTINGS
Text by Scott McCracken
“I think that accident, which I would call luck, is one of the most important and fertile aspects of it, because, it anything works for me, I feel it is nothing I have made myself, but something which chance has been able to give me. But it’s true to say that over a great many years I have been thinking about chance and the possibilities of using what chance can give, and I never know how much of it is pure chance and how much it is the manipulation of chance.”
Francis Bacon
Hitoko Urago’s paintings have their own backstory. Although not necessarily reflective of the artist’s own biography, these paintings are autobiographical in so much as they tell the story of their own making. It appears that each mark is produced in a moment of its own conception. Everything is ready and waiting; the brush, the paint, the canvas…waiting to be brought together by Urago culminating in a series of weighted, directional and intuitively guided ‘moves’. The physicality of thought is an important aspect of how the work is realised. Paint is pushed and pulled on, around and through itself: it is thinned, smeared, dripped, stained into twisting, sprawling lines and scuffed-on passages of colour. Often there is a contrast of hard-edged geometry with a more fluidly organic shape-making, for example in Festival to the Unknown (2025). It is a space of opposing forces that vibrate and convulse, weaving in and out of each other, populating the painting’s surface. There is no conformity of the range of marks and movements; they have a kind of antagonistic and contradictory relationship. One sensibility advances towards the other, only to then be counterattacked by a competing sensibility.
In some of the paintings, such as Untitled(p25 s 2) (2025), a coherent uniform ground remains present. It becomes a space for the doing of painting to be indexed but also for it to be seized in the moment and secured into position. To continue to remain visible long after the action has been completed. There is the separation of individual gestures and forms which forces us to consider similarities and differences, continuities and proximities. And whilst these indeed look like cursive and uncurbed notations, they also avoid plunging into a kind of excessiveness or melodrama. They are, however, all clearly and unmistakably decisions. Choices have been made, whether considered or impulsive. They seemingly pivot on an economical lucidity that rejects an unnecessary over-accumulation of ‘paint for the sake of paint’. In the work, there is a doing and a not doing. An offering and a withholding.
An open-plan structure is arrived at, where the space between and behind the forms is not only activated, but also indicates depths and distances, of elements attracting and repelling each other. A kind of electromagnetic field. They offer us moments of concise animation, which inadvertently invoke all four states of matter: solids, liquids, gases but specifically plasmas. There is something plasmatic to be found in Urago’s work. Plasmatic in terms of particles being charged, of waves moving through a field in space, of points radiating with different energies. The paintings do indeed look as if they are slowly heating up. Glowing from within, as if there is a small flame buried deep down inside and that warm light is slowly but steadily finding its way towards us.
Urago regularly uses a square format for many of the recent paintings. The dimensions remaining equal along all four sides, nothing is stretched vertically to indicate an interior or horizontally to imply an exterior. Instead, we are firmly reorientated back to a position of painting as process. Painting as thought. In Untitled (p-25 s 3) (2025), a rounded cosmic entity rests on the canvas’s bottom edge, as if a planet, or possibly even a galaxy, has landed and the troupe of interrupted blocks and unfurled marks we see surrounding it have been discharged from inside the extra-terrestrial orb. A release of both fluid and force.
There are other paintings, such as Unknown Fields (vol 2) (2025) and the Reconnect series (2025), where the material of paint has found its way into every part of the canvas, creating a more layered covering. In these, each action can no longer be seen as an individual acknowledgement but as a compounding of reactions all happening simultaneously. As a consequence, the space of these paintings behave differently to the less filled-in ones as the surface knits itself together into a solitary terrain. The plane has a unity to it, where the transitions between one point and another are more integrated so as to create an out-of-focus atmosphere. Here we feel closer to the paint, but possibly further removed from the act of painting itself whereby the process has been obfuscated to a greater degree. Paint unevenly clusters and clumps together. Rather than being routed through the pictorial space, the paint occupies the pictorial space. It becomes the pictorial space. It seeps and slips and swarms.
With Urago’s paintings, it is difficult not to immediately align it to the idiom of abstraction, but such straightforward labelling such as this is often precarious and unnecessary. This is also reflected in how Urago frequently titles her work. Rather than bestowing names, words or phrases to act as titles (although there are exceptions), a painting is usually allocated a unique designation made up of letters, numbers, parts and volumes, much like one would use to attribute to a document or file as a means of identification. It signals that these are works that should be considered sequentially. There is a before and an after. Again, we find ourselves returning to the speculative idea of the paintings as documents of the process of their own making.
Whatever associations one may bring to Urago’s paintings, they are first and foremost marks of existence. Marks that not only substantiate the painting’s existence but also the existence of Urago herself. Urago cites wabi-sabi - which is based on principles of imperfection, impermanence, and incompleteness - as a relevant source for her work. These notions directly lead into a kind of acting and reacting in the moment, where intuition and chance become fundamental components entering into the work. This way of making feeds off a nexus of capricious occurrences that cannot be fully known or understood until after they have taken place (and sometimes they undoubtedly remain unknown even afterwards). It is the doing of it rather than the knowing of it that is important here.
As the British painter Francis Bacon pondered with his own work, is it ‘pure chance or the manipulation of chance’ that has transpired? Arguably, in painting there is always some type of manipulation of the unknown that has had to take place for it to ultimately find itself. In that sense, these are paintings that do not necessarily speak to us, but rather they feel to us. The lack of linguistic cogency is countered by a sense of mental instinct and bodily spontaneity; there is no definitive outcome or underlying message that is trying to be communicated directly to us. It seems as if the paintings are resolutely undermining their desire for a subject. Instead, they throw the artist and the viewer into a kind of psychogenic commune, where the painting then becomes a conduit linking one body and one consciousness to another. As Amy Sillman remarked “you don’t have a voice when making a painting, you have a body.”