Lot Essay
In his signature style, Hiroki Yasutomi directs the viewer's attention to the numerous details found in his drawings, such as the thousands of tiny rain drops caught on a transparent umbrella casually discarded on a wet ground. With the lone pencil medium, Yasutomi uses various tones and drawing techniques to build a richly, fully dimensional scene. The intentionally sparse panorama and cropped composition allows Yasutomi to ponder the minute occurrences in the very moment before the umbrella was abandoned. Creating an intimacy between the umbrella and the viewer, we are engaged as a participant in the story, as though the audience stumbled upon the umbrella on a midnight stroll. The artist's ability to portray the sensuousness of a fleeting moment in time with such great delicacy and simplicity, and to infuse it with depth of emotion and elements of poetic expression conveys both his intellectualism and artistic brilliance.