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Yoshida, p. 6

wire samples, tramp art objects, paintings, advertisements and whatever are not sources of images for Yoshida which he then transforms or modulates along the lines of his own esthetic. Instead, these varied collections compose an immense repertoire of fresh principles of arrangement, form and design, principles which the artist wishes to activate within his own work by emulation rather than adaptive imitation. Yoshida's collections represent for him examples of successful (if unlikely) resolution of certain formal questions and he wishes to achieve the same degree of both inventiveness and successful formal resolution in his own work without imitating these objects but rather by absorbing into his own point of view the formal and compositional systems they employ and embody. This is very different from the Pop Art practice of the 1960s which estheticised, through the formal and compositional means of mainstream twentieth-century European modernism, banal objects and images typifying the nature of contemporaneous American popular culture. Yoshida wishes to be like the makers of the objects he collects and enjoys, not to "art up" their images. 

The "bathrobe" pictures of 1970-72 reveal Yoshida in a hitherto relatively unusual undertaking, that of tackling the issues of monumental figurative images. His faceless robed beings, singly or in couples, suggest that they are caught in frozen states of intense and piercing internal awarenesses. Because we are not given facial expressions to read but rather bandings or swathings in the facial area, the poses and gestures of the figures (and in the case of the double figures, their positions in relation to one another) assume a theatrical and hieratic importance: it is a little like interpreting a mime whose face is completely covered. The striped and wavy backgrounds of these paintings suggest oscillating fields of emotion